Knowledge Management Practices From A Culture
Free And Culture Specific Perspektive

von: Fatma Torun

Table of Contents

I. Introduction 1

1.1 The Influence of National Culture on Knowledge Management 1
1.2 Objectives 1
1.3 Scope and Limitations 2

II. Literature Review 3

2.1 Cultural Issues 3

2.1.1 Definition of Culture 3
2.1.2 Culture Free versus Culture Specific 4

2.2 Knowledge Management Issues 5

2.2.1 Definition of Knowledge 5
2.2.2 Knowledge Management 5
2.2.3 Knowledge Management Systems 6
2.2.4 Knowledge Management – Culture Free or Culture Specific? 6

2.2.4.1 The Cultural Free View 6
2.2.4.2 The Culture Specific View 7

2.3 National Culture: Hofstede´s Model of Spain and Germany 8
2.4 National Culture and Knowledge Management 10

III. Application: Knowledge Management at XXX 11

3.1 Knowledge Management at XXX Germany 11
3.2 Knowledge Management for the Project XY 11
3.3 Knowledge Management Initiatives at XXX Spain 12
3.4 Why did Knowledge Management fail at XXX Spain? 13

3.4.1 Culture Specific Reasons 13
3.4.2 Culture Free Reasons 14

3.5 Implications 15

IV. Conclusion and Recommendations for Further Research 16

V. Bibliography 17

I. Introduction

The Cultural Wall
“Recently a large global company set up a sophisticated website for employees in international subsidiaries to share knowledge. It had areas for chat, document storage, and messages from the company’s leadership. Everything was clearly segmented so information could be looked up in many different ways. The designers expected people to load many documents onto the site. But even it was interesting, easy to use, and had many features, hardly anyone visited the website. Potential users said that they liked it, but just did not have time for it. The designers felt that they hit the ‘cultural wall’.”  Figure 1: The Cultural Wall [Abbildung in der Downloaddatei vorhanden]

1.1 The Influence of National Culture on Knowledge Management

Today, most organisations are aware that managing their knowledge effectively is the only way to achieve sustainable competitive advantage (Drucker, 2001). Companies not securing systematically knowledge for later usage, risk to reinvent solutions and to incur unnecessary expense to relearn the same lessons (Tiwana, 1999). But in an increasingly global business context, companies not only need to understand the importance of knowledge management but also the importance of (national) cultural differences which influence knowledge management processes. Recognising cultural differences is an important step to anticipating potential threats as well as opportunities.

1.2 Objectives
The purpose of this report is to answer the question to which extent national culture influence knowledge management processes and how national culture can promote or hinder company’s ability to implement organisation-wide knowledge management efforts.

Therefore, in the theoretical part the emphasis lies on cultural aspects, especially culture free and culture specific issues linked with knowledge management. Hofstede’s theory will be applied to Spanish culture to examine the influence of national culture on knowledge management practices. In the practical part a failed knowledge management project at XXX will be examined in order to determine areas of improvement and to avoid the same mistakes in further knowledge management initiatives at XXX .

1.3 Scope and Limitations

When analysing the influence of culture on knowledge management, there are important facts to consider. First, the focus of this report is on national culture and not on organisational culture, assuming that organisational culture is similar in both XXX Spain and XXX Germany. Further, evaluating management practices in relation with national cultures should be done with caution because it operates with stereotypes. Finally, due to the length of the report, the focus is more on cultural aspects of knowledge management initiatives, so that technical facts of knowledge management programmes could not be examined in detail.

II. Literature Review

The role of culture and technology factors in knowledge management (KM) is the source of major disagreement within the KM community (Snowden, 2003). A frequent statement is that an effective KM solution focuses 90 percent on cultural factors and 10 percent on technological factors (Snowden, 2003). Contrary to this, others see KM as being mostly about technology. The first view is largely driven by the interests of wishing to privilege the role of people in organisations, the second by those arguing for KM as a concept of mostly tools and systems. To understand this debate, an overview of the main cultural and knowledge issues will be given in this section.

2.1 Cultural Issues

The term culture can refer to professional culture, organisational culture, and national culture. Although KM literature thus so far has focused on organisational culture, national culture is the primary focus of this report.

2.1.1 Definition of Culture

According to Hofstede (1980) national culture is defined as “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one human group from another” (ibid, p. 25).
Prior to Hofstede’s analysis, many businesses considered organizational culture to be independent of national culture. However, Hofstede (1980) argued that they cannot assume that organisational cultures exist independently of national cultures because organisation’s culture is nested within a national culture. Therefore, national culture influences human resource practices and organisational behaviour.
Geertz (1993) developed a definition of culture based on knowledge: “Culture is the means by which people communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life” (ibid, p. 89). This is the only definition of culture founded in the literature review, which reveals a linkage between knowledge and culture.

2.1.2 Culture Free versus Culture Specific

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