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Top1. Introduction
Projects today are becoming an increasingly popular way to organize work (Lindgren et al., 2014; Söderlund et al., 2008) and are characterized as temporary units aimed at achieving a specific goal. However, projects’ temporality has raised the problem of knowledge loss (Ekambaram, 2008). It is a widely accepted fact that knowledge is one of the most important assets for organizations in today’s knowledge-based economy (Andreeva & Garanina, 2016; Borodako et al., 2021), and it is a non-imitable capability and a competitive advantage that is crucial for organizational success (Kim & Trimi, 2007). For example, studies show that managing knowledge is critical for product innovation (Law et al., 2021). Although projects provide an opportunity for organizations to generate new knowledge, their characteristics, such as temporality and resource limitations, challenge their ability to transfer this knowledge to the rest of the organization (Bartsch et al., 2013; Defillippi & Arthur, 1998; Söderlund et al., 2008). Therefore, it is important for organizations, especially project-intensive ones, to have a clear and formal focus on knowledge transfer (Ajmal et al., 2009). The IT industry provides an excellent context for studying knowledge transfer, as it is defined as a knowledge-intensive industry in which knowledge is the core input material (Mishra & Bhaskar, 2011). Furthermore, quickly changing environments and rapid technological development (Mishra & Bhaskar, 2011) make this industry especially interesting, as the need for new knowledge is very high.
Facilitating knowledge transfer in organizations has proven to be challenging (Anantatmula, 2010), and over the years, it has become apparent that one of the most prominent obstacles to successful knowledge transfer is the organization’s culture (Ajmal & Koskinen, 2008; Wiewiora et al., 2013). For example, Mengesha et al. (2021) argue that it is more of a cultural and organizational issue than a technical one. Extensive research has been devoted to understanding organizational culture’s role in encouraging knowledge transfer in various organizational settings (Ajmal et al., 2009; Ajmal & Koskinen, 2008; Wiewiora et al., 2013). However, more research is still needed on this topic in project-intensive organizations, especially on which cultural elements have the greatest effect on knowledge transfer (Wei & Miraglia, 2017). Additionally, others have argued that more research is needed on the relationship between organizational culture and knowledge transfer mechanisms, as this is relatively complex and unknown (Wiewiora et al., 2014). Lee et al. (2016) recognize that little research has been conducted to understand organizational culture’s impact on knowledge transfer in software development. Hartmann and Dorée (2015) also emphasize that previous studies on knowledge transfer in project-intensive organizations have placed too much emphasis on studying projects from knowledge senders’ and receivers’ perspectives while neglecting the organization as a whole. They also highlight the importance of considering knowledge transfer in the social and cultural context in which these projects operate. Consequently, the research question investigated in this study is stated as follows: How does organizational culture affect the knowledge transfer process in project-intensive IT organizations?