Why is organization culture and organizational politics important to information and knowledge management?

Authors Avatar

        Knowledge Management Assignment 2

Why is organization culture and organizational politics important to information and knowledge management?

Organizations are essentially the products of the ways that the people that comprise them think and interact. Every organization is made up of both the official hierarchy as shown in the organizational charts and unseen associations between people in the networks and communities. People bring with them an unavoidable culture and politics. Politics is present in organizations as the relationships which allow particular people to have power over others. They say knowledge is power. In some organizational cultures it certainly is. Consider how much Bill Gates or Richard Branson’s Business Skills would be worth, could you even put a figure on it? Overcoming professionals’ natural reluctance to share their most precious asset, knowledge, presents some common and difficult challenges. The true engine of today’s organizations is the brainpower of employees.

An organizational culture is the way an organization views the world, based on the experiences of its previous successes and failures. Culture is the way we do things around here, a set of tacit assumptions that have developed over time. It is a form of unspoken knowledge, the seldom discussed assumptions that are behind the actions we take. Once a culture is acquired it is inherently stable. To improve the way an organization manages knowledge and information, change must be introduced. But in some cases, introducing change of any kind is analogous to throwing a spanner into a well functioning engine. Depending on the organizational culture and politics, it could be akin to throwing a monkey wrench and a power drill or two into the organizational engine.

The organizations of our contemporary society operate in a changing environment. The successful ones embrace change and evolve with the times

In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future

Eric Hoffer, Author and Philosopher

        A successful organization is a learning organization.  

 Phillip Baumard

A learning organization is likely to have a receptive culture, and is not frightened to make mistakes as part of its learning experience. Here is an example where such a culture helped an organization grow:

IBM company lore has it that a young manager called into the CEO’s office after losing $10million on a risky business venture saying “I guess you’ll be wanting my resignation”. The CEO replied “You must be joking, we just spent $10million educating you”

Join now!

Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management

Few organizations have the openness and trust needed to admit this kind of failure. Such insights are rarely analyzed and internalized by a company. The culture makes the difference.  If everyone in the organization has that attitude of the IBM CEO, the overall culture within the organization becomes one of learning and development.  If the young manager had got sacked he would have walked out the door and taken this valuable knowledge with him. However, IBM is unwilling to stumble along, oblivious to the lessons of the past.  It is an organization that ...

This is a preview of the whole essay