Organizational Culture On Knowledge Creation And Knowledge Application

With the arrival of the era of knowledge economy, human capital is playing a more and more significant role in the resource structure of an organization. How to create more knowledge and how to make good use of their knowledge is the key process for an organization to improve its competitive advantage. Variety of cases suggest that only make avail of their owned knowledge can a company win the success in the competitive market. In order to adpapt to the more and more complicated environment, more and more companies plan to carry out knowledge management program to enhance their innovation capacity and flexibility. Therefore, knowledge creation and knowledge application was placed great emphasis on both by researchers and managers. However, many companies ignored the impact of organizational culture in the process of knowledge management programs. The past researches suggest that organizational culture have great influence on knowledge creation and knowledge application, but no researcher has investigated the relationship of specific organizational culture dimensions, knowledge creation, knowledge application and centralization /decentralization.The main work of this study include four aspects: (1) developing the scales to measure organizational culture, konwledge creation and knowledge application in China by pre-survey; (2) using correlation analysis, regression analysis and structure equation modeling to study the relationships among the dimensions of organizational culture, knowledge creation and knowledge application; (3) Testing centraliztion/ decentralization as moderator between organizational culture and knowledge creation/ knowledge application; (4) exploring how the demographic features of organization affect the four dimensions of organizational culture, konwledge creation and knowledge application.Correspond to the four aspects above, this study takes the company of Mainland China as samples. Based on literature review, scale items were designed. By the pre-survey, the author tests the reliability of the questionnaire. While collecting datum formally, the author distributed the questionnaire by random sample. A total of 793 questionnaires were randomly distributed to managers and knowledge workers of different companies in Hangzhou, Shaoxing and Chengdu, and the valid were 518.The research uses SPSS 13.0 and AMOS 4.0 statistical software to analyze the survey data, and came to the following conclusions: (1) only three dimensions of organizational culture(risk-taking, perceived trust and collectivism) influence knowledge creation positively and significantly; (2) the four dimensions of organizational culture positively and significantly influences knowledge application; (3) centralization /decentralization partly makes a moderate effect on the relationship between organizational cutlure and knowledge creation/knowledge application; (4) different scales of organization have significant influence on knowledge application, the other demographic features have no impact on all the variables.