ABSTRACT
Knowledge management initiatives to help organizations create and distribute internal knowledge have become important aspects to many organizations’ strategy. The knowledge-based theory of the firm suggests that knowledge is the organizational asset that enables sustainable competitive advantage in hypercompetitive markets. Systems designed to facilitate knowledge management (knowledge management systems) are being implemented in an attempt to increase the quality and speed of knowledge creation and distribution in organizations. However, such systems are often seen to clash with corporate culture and, as a result, have limited impact. This chapter introduces a framework for assessing those aspects of organizational culture that are likely to be the source of implementation challenges. In so doing, it associates various organizational subunit cultures with different information cultures, and presents a series of propositions concerning the relationships among individual, organizational, and information cultures.
