Organizational Culture for Knowledge Management

When we talk about culture, we can imagine such things as human manners, how they communicate, and so on. Culture can be implemented for almost anything, and in this case, we speak in the organization. Culture can be seen in organizations, how people interact with new employees from different countries and how they manage to get their jobs done. This has become a new challenge for the organization itself to maintain good communication at work and achieve its goal.

            There are some key elements that include in organizational culture which are:

• Stated and unstated values
• Overt and implicit expectation for member behavior
• Customs and rituals
• Stories and myths about the history of the group
• Shop talk
• Climate
• Metaphors and symbols

All of this can be related to how each worker understands how other workers do their jobs or how to approach other workers. This is important as there will be a time when they will have to work as a team.

There are three myths about KM which can be related with culture:

1. Build it and they will come

• People rarely take the time to learn new tools. This is correct because, depending on people’s abilities to understand new tools, it can be easy or difficult for them.
• Technology doesn’t always give them what they want / need: if the tools are difficult to understand, chances are they don’t need that technology after all.
• People often do not know what knowledge they need: there can be a lot of knowledge that can be used for a particular job,but finding a suitable one will take more time.

2. Technology can replace face-to-face

Only if you ignore valuable tacit knowledge: I think implicitly still matters if technology wasn’t ready to actually replace face-to-face. Because if technology cannot develop knowledge that can be used for others, we are not preparing to use that technology.

3. First you have to create a learning culture

It’s very hard and it takes a long time to change culture – focus on changing behaviors and then culture: true because culture is something we normally do or take a long time to learn / I think it’s better if we change our behavior, but that doesn’t completely change culture. It is better if we change the behavior that is actually still related to our culture.

Goffee and Johns stated that there is another type of culture based on the expert.

1. In the first dimension, sociability is a measure of friendliness.
2. The second dimension, solidarity, is a measure of task orientation.

These types can be related in terms of how they work in the organization. First, it was said that sociability was a measure of friendliness. The more we communicate with others, the more we can give people their opinions on our behavior. Second, solidarity is a measure of task orientation. If we can work together, we can achieve the goal. Both types can be good and bad, depending on the corporate culture.

Reference :

Dalkir, K. (2017). Knowledge Management in Theory & Practice, 3^rd edition. MIT Press