Diagnosing cultural barriers to knowledge management

TLDR

Organizational culture is increasingly recognized as a major barrier to leveraging intellectual assets. The article identifies four ways in which culture influences the behaviors central to knowledge creation, sharing, and use. Culture shapes knowledge management through four mechanisms: defining what knowledge matters, determining who controls and shares it, setting the social context for its use, and guiding the creation, legitimation, and distribution of new knowledge. These perspectives suggest actions for managers to assess cultural aspects influencing knowledge behaviors, and the diagnosis is the critical first step toward aligning culture with effective knowledge use.

Abstract

Executive Overview Organizational culture is increasingly recognized as a major barrier to leveraging intellectual assets. This article identifies four ways in which culture influences the behaviors central to knowledge creation, sharing, and use. First, culture—and particularly subcultures—shape assumptions about what knowledge is and which knowledge is worth managing. Second, culture defines the relationships between individual and organizational knowledge, determining who is expected to control specific knowledge, as well as who must share it and who can hoard it. Third, culture creates the context for social interaction that determines how knowledge will be used in particular situations. Fourth, culture shapes the processes by which new knowledge—with its accompanying uncertainties—is created, legitimated, and distributed in organizations. These four perspectives suggest specific actions managers can take to assess the different aspects of culture most likely to influence knowledge-related behaviors. This diagnosis is the critical first step in developing a strategy and specific interventions to align the firm's culture in support of more effective knowledge use.