Knowledge Management and Organisational Culture

Abstract

Knowledge management exists to make the most of knowledge in an organisation. It is concerned with identifying and leveraging the collective knowledge to provide an organisation with a competitive advantage (Alavi and Leidn 2001). The use of knowledge is the point, not the knowledge or knowledge management per se. This implies that knowledge can be used to improve the performance of an organisation, and so when we talk about knowledge management there is an implicit emphasis on organisational change in general, and specifically on changing organisational culture (Massaro 2015). To this end, knowledge management has evolved from an interest in information management, through an emphasis on knowledge-sharing and more recently to ways of understanding the impact of knowledge management on organisations and their culture (Holste and Fields 2010). Attempts to change organisational culture are intended to lead to continuous improvement, with a view to increasing competitive advantage (Chang and Lin 2015;Li et al. 2013). In this content, knowledge management is a means to organisational learning (Allameh et al. 2011).The case for knowledge management is often made a strategic level. The drivers, however, are in fact more prosaic, and result from two dramatically opposite approaches to overall organisational approaches. Margins are central to viability and profitability; they are maintained through the different strategies of cost control and added value. Ironically, knowledge management is seen to be a panacea for achieving both. If cost control and associated price