Adoption of Knowledge Management Technologies and Organisational Culture: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Organisational culture is increasingly recognised as a major facilitator or barrier to leverage intellectual assets. Early works have shown that there are various technologies that support knowledge management (KM). This research presents an empirical study designed to explore and investigate the sophisticated relationships between organisational culture and the adoption of KM technologies. According to empirical studies, organisational culture could be decomposed into five dimensions: rational, group, development, hierarchical and ethical culture. On the other hand, the application of KM technologies can be categorised into five major categories: creation, storage/retrieval, transfer, application and platform technology. A random sample of 1000 largest companies in Taiwan was chosen as target organisations for this study. Among them, 121 completed survey responses were received, which yielding an effective response rate of 12.1%. The result of the correlation analysis indicates that storage/retrieval and platform technologies have positive relationships with all the cultures, while creation technologies are positively correlated with ethical, group and development cultures; and application technologies with development and hierarchical cultures. However, in general, organisational culture and KM technologies are weakly correlated. Moreover, though the majority of corporations started to recognise the value and importance of KM, there are only a few technologies such as database, email, intranet and Internet that were highly adopted and frequently used in KM activities. There exists a huge gap between recognising the importance of KM and enthusiastically adopting KM technologies. This study contributes to the understanding of how organisational culture affects and interacts with KM technologies and in what ways. It also demonstrates the current status of KM technology adoption in Taiwan's large corporations.