Lecture 10

Knowledge management and culture

Introduction

• The failure of many information or knowledge management

systems is often as a result of cultural factors rather than
technological oversights.
• Culture, by its nature, is a foggy subject with a variety of
perspectives and interpretations.
Understanding organizational culture and climate

• In an attempt to understand social environments and their

effects or interactions with individuals, there have been two
distinct concepts that have developed:
• Organizational climate
• Organizational culture.
 Organizational climate
• Organizational climate has much older roots in psychology and was
strongly influenced by field theory (Lewin 1948; Lewin 1951).

• In the Lewinian understanding of social

environments, the individual is assumed
to be separate from the environment,
acting either as a subject or an agent,
and the underlying framework for field
theory can be expressed simply as:

where the social processes equate to

B=behaviour , P=person and
E=environment.
Elements of Climate
• Quality of Leadership
• Amount of Trust

• Communication, upward and downward

• Feeling of useful work
• Responsibility
• Fair rewards
• Reasonable job pressure
• Opportunity
• Reasonable controls, structure, and bureaucracy
• Employee involvement, participation.
Measuring Climate
• Litwin & Stringer • Likert
• Structure • Leadership Processes

• Responsibility • Motivational forces

• Reward • Communication
• Risk • Interaction-influence process
• Warmth • Decision-making
• Support • Goal setting
• Standards • Control
• Conflict
• Identity
Climate Influences

Motivation

Satisfaction Performance
Organizational climate Weaknesses

lack of agreement on metrics

poor contingent relationships

lack of clear categorizations of climate

What is Organizational culture ?

• The set of shared values and norms that controls

organizational members’ interactions with each other and
with people outside the organization.
Basic Terms
• Values: general criteria, standards, or guiding principles that
people use to determine which types of behaviors, events,
situations, and outcomes are desirable or undesirable.
• Terminal value: a desired end state or outcome that
people seek to achieve
• Instrumental value: a desired mode of behavior
Standard Operating Procedure
Organizational culture
• Based on enduring values embodied in organizational
norms, rules, standard operating procedures, and goals
People draw on these cultural values to guide their actions
and decisions when faced with uncertainty and ambiguity
• Important influence on members’ behavior and response to
situations.
Strong and Weak Cultures
• Strong cultures are often shaped by strong values and
strong leadership.
• Factors that determine the strength of an organizational
culture are :
Shared-ness
Intensity
Characteristics of Organizational Culture

• Observed Behavioral Regularities

• Norms
• Dominant Values
• Philosophy
• Rules
• Organizational Climate
How is an Organization’s Culture Transmitted to its
Members?

• Socialization: the process by which members learn and

internalize the values and norms of an organization’s culture
How is an Organization’s Culture Transmitted to its
Members?

• Role orientation: the characteristic way in which

newcomers respond to a situation
• Institutionalized role orientation: results when
individuals are taught to respond to a new context in the
same way that existing organizational members respond
to it.
• Individualized role orientations: results when individuals
are allowed and encouraged to be creative and to
experiment with changing norms and values
How Socialization Tactics Shape Employees’ Role
Orientation
How is an Organization’s Culture Transmitted to its
Members?

• Collective vs. individual

• Collective tactics: provide newcomers with common
learning experiences designed to produce a standardized
response to a situation
• Individual tactics: each newcomer’s learning experiences
are unique, and newcomers can learn new, appropriate
responses for each situation
How is an Organization’s Culture Transmitted to its
Members?

• Formal vs. informal

– Formal tactics: segregate newcomers from existing
organizational members during the learning process

– Informal tactics: newcomers learn on the job, as

members of a team
How is an Organization’s Culture Transmitted to its
Members?

• Sequential vs. random

– Sequential tactics: provide newcomers with explicit

information about the sequence in which they will
perform new activities or occupy new roles as they
advance in an organization

– Random tactics: training is based on the interests and

needs of individual newcomers because there is no set
sequence to the newcomers’ progress in the
organization
How is an Organization’s Culture Transmitted to its
Members?

• Fixed vs. variable

– Fixed tactics: give newcomers precise knowledge of

the timetable associated with completing each stage in
the learning process

– Variable tactics: provide no information about when

newcomers will reach a certain stage in the learning
process
How is an Organization’s Culture Transmitted to its
Members?

• Serial vs. disjunctive

– Serial tactics: employed, existing organizational

members act as role models and mentors for newcomers

– Disjunctive processes: require newcomers to figure out

and develop their own way of behaving
How is an Organization’s Culture Transmitted to its
Members?

• Divestiture vs. investiture

– Divestiture: newcomers receive negative social support

and existing organizational members withhold support
until newcomers learn the ropes and conform to
established norms

– Investiture: newcomers immediately receive positive

social support from other organizational members and
are encouraged to be themselves
Where Does Organizational Culture Come From?

• Comes from interaction of four factors:

– The personal and professional characteristics of people

within the organization

– Organizational ethics

– The property rights that the organization gives to

employees

– The structure of the organization

Can Organizational Culture be Managed?

• Changing a culture can be very difficult

– Hard to understand how the previous four factors

interact

– Major alterations are sometimes needed

• Some ways culture can be changed:

– Redesign structure

– Revise property rights used to motivate people

– Change the people – especially top management

The ‘cultural soup’ or structures that underlie organizational cultures are the deeply
held values, beliefs, attitudes and assumptions in the organization.
 ‫طقوس‬

‫اﻵثار‬
‫شدة‬ ‫إجماع‬
Values, beliefs, attitudes and assumptions
Values, beliefs, attitudes and assumptions
Organizational values fall into four categories and it is
important to avoid confusion between them:
Typologies of organizational culture
In the language of organizational culture, it may be useful to
provide classifications for different configurations of culture
found in organizations.
Creating knowledge-sharing cultures