Knowledge Management
solyman shafee; daryosh ghafari; Mohsen Jafari
Abstract
Background and Objectives: Organizational knowledge creation is the process of making available and developing new knowledge as well as shaping and associating it with the organization's knowledge system. Some believe that the interaction between tacit knowledge and open knowledge is the source of knowledge ...
Read More
Background and Objectives: Organizational knowledge creation is the process of making available and developing new knowledge as well as shaping and associating it with the organization's knowledge system. Some believe that the interaction between tacit knowledge and open knowledge is the source of knowledge creation, by which the quality and quantity of explicit and latent knowledge develops. The importance of culture in knowledge creation is for the great deal of knowledge that has been learned as a culture from previous generations. Therefore, organizations need to study organizational culture before undertaking knowledge management. Organization must understand the type of their culture in a typical business environment to consider the degree of appropriateness between the knowledge management issues and their culture. the purpose of this paper is to determine the impact of different types of organizational culture based on Cameron and Quinn's competitive values framework with knowledge creation process in Kermanshah Public Libraries.
Methodology: The present study is a survey in terms of data collection and a descriptive research in terms of analectic level. The study sample consisted of managers and staff of Kermanshah General Department and Public Libraries with 87 members. According to Krejcie and Morgan table, the sample size was 70 people. Fifty-one sample members (equals 73% of the sample) answered the questionnaire. Data collection was done by both library and field methods. Library methods were used to gather information on the theoretical foundations and background of the research and the field methods were used to respond to research hypotheses. We used a questionnaire to collect data. The questions were presented using the Likert scale of organizational knowledge creation questionnaire and organizational culture assessment tool. Cronbach's alpha for the reliability of the knowledge creation questionnaire was 0.90 and for the organizational culture questionnaire was 0.81. Descriptive statistics and inferential statistics were used to describe and analyze the data. Descriptive statistics were collected from central tendency indices and dispersion indices such as frequency, percentage of frequency, mean, variance and standard deviation to express the data. Pearson's correlation coefficient, multiple regression, Friedman's mean rankings, Kolmogorov-Smirnov and path analysis were used to answer the research hypotheses. SPSS 25, and AMOS were used for data analysis.
Findings: The results of Friedman mean rank test showed that the mean of hierarchical culture was 5.26, native culture was 5.15, adhocracy culture was 4.55 and market culture was 4.3. Therefore, hierarchical culture had the highest rank and market culture had the lowest rank. Multiple correlation coefficient (0.83) indicated a positive and significant relationship between organizational culture and knowledge creation. The results of regression analysis showed that market culture and native culture with regression effect of 22.8 had the greatest effect on knowledge creation and the final fitted model had a coefficient of determination of 0.70. The results of the study of knowledge conversion status showed that it is oriented towards the composition and internalization of knowledge. Path analysis results showed that market culture had the most direct effect (0.79) and adhocracy culture had the least indirect effect (0.55). Native culture, adhocracy culture and hierarchical culture had an indirect effect on the process of knowledge creation. Based on the results of path analysis, an experimental framework was presented.
Discussion: The results show that the organizational culture in Kermanshah Public Libraries was 0.72 effective on the knowledge creation process. This result indicates that there is a supportive culture in Kermanshah Public Libraries for scientific activities. Therefore, the existing organizational culture as the personality and foundation of the organization plays an effective role in establishing knowledge management. Kermanshah Public Libraries must first identify its organizational culture and implement knowledge management programs in line with the existing organizational culture in order to effectively create and disseminate knowledge across the organization. Among the types of organizational culture, market culture has the most influence on knowledge creation in public libraries which is a competitive and resultant culture and the leadership style is based on productive competition and strategic emphasis on competitive advantage and market superiority. the adaptation of the library to the environment and adaption of the environment to the organization needs seem to be essential. In the process of knowledge creation, the attention should be upon the composition and the internalization of knowledge. This was not in line with the theory of Nonaka which emphasized the importance of tacit knowledge in the process of knowledge creation, and that externalizing knowledge was the main process of knowledge creation. This research is limited to public libraries, so other libraries should be studied to increase the generalizability of results. On the other hand, the present study has assessed the relationship between the knowledge creation process and organizational culture based on a set of attitudes, so in different societies witch have different cultures, future research must be done to be able to extend the results to other societies.
