Organizational Culture and Knowledge Sharing

Today I'm working on revisions to a chapter in a new knowledge management book. As part of this chapter I'm discussing the importance of organizational culture in knowledge management system (KMS) implementations. Today I'm looking at a few of the main issues with the organizational culture for organizations unable to realize KMS success.

As I noted in earlier posts, challenges with KMS implementations generally fall into three categories: technical challenges, people challenges, and organizational challenges. When looking into organizational challenges we see that organizational culture plays a significant role in the success of a KMS implementation. Looking at a few knowledge management articles (here, here, and here) I found a few key factors in the organizational culture leading to effective KMS implementations.

The organizational culture supporting knowledge sharing must include managerial prompting, group identification, and proper social value orientation. This means that managers need to support knowledge sharing, the organization must work to create a common goal for the workers, and the firm must hire people inclined to collaborate and share.

Over the next few posts I'll discuss each of these cultural attributes further.