Impact of Organizational Culture on Knowledge Management in Higher Education

Abstract

Knowledge management is a set of purposeful activities led by management in order to enable and support generation, storage, transfer and application of knowledge within an organization so as to create value and improve the organization’s effectiveness. The effectiveness of these activities is in a large part dependent on organizational culture, which can support or impede the two-way social process of learning and knowledge sharing between individuals, groups, organizations, and artifacts. This chapter discusses the fundamentals of organizational culture and knowledge management, their definitions, components, and processes. Specifically, the study presented is focused on how different types of organizational culture, as defined by the competing values framework, might be related to the iterative processes of knowledge generation, storage, transfer, and application in higher education.