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knowledge sharing. The following section discusses these factors as suggested by other
studies.
2.4.2.1. Organisational Culture.
With changing work practices, organisations are increasingly faced by the need to change
their norms, values and motivation of employees. According to Peter Gottschalk, knowledge
management projects revealed that organisational culture is widely held to be the major
barrier to creating and leveraging of knowledge assets (Gottschalk, P. 2004, p.38). Long and
Fahey identified four ways in which culture influences the behaviours central to knowledge
creation, sharing and use. First, culture and particularly subcultures, shape assumptions about
which knowledge are worth managing. Second, culture defines the relationships between
individuals and organisational knowledge, determining who is expected to control specific
knowledge, as well as who must share it and who can hoard it. Third, culture creates the
context for social interaction that determines how knowledge will be used in particular
situations. Fourth, culture shapes the processes by which new knowledge with its
accompanying uncertainties is created, legitimated and distributed in organisations. These
four perspectives according to them suggest specific actions managers can take to assess the
different aspects of culture most likely to influence knowledge related behaviours (Long &
Fahey, 2000).
The perception of an organisation of the importance of knowledge is similarly important for
the achievement of knowledge sharing. Organisations will always value what they believe to
be important to their success. Fleisher and Blenkhorn in “Controversies in competitive
intelligence” suggest that some organisational cultures value personal technical expertise and
knowledge creation over knowledge sharing. They see this problem as often persisting in
engineering and knowledge based organisations such as research and consulting firms
(Fleisher & Blenkhorn, 2003, p.99).
Robert H. Buckman urges that the culture that we create as leaders in our respective
organisations has a major impact on our ability to share knowledge across time and space.
Buckman stresses that people need to move from hoarding of knowledge to gain power to the
sharing of knowledge to gain power (Buckman, 2004). However, many researches suggest
that changing culture is indeed difficult though it happens. According to Holsapple in the
current and the future environment, the major challenge relates to finding, creating, or
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