Overcoming cultural barriers to innovation and knowledge sharing: an organization perspective

Organizational culture is described as the norms and value systems that are shared among the employees of an organization. Also is a collective programming of mind that distinguishes one group from another. Culture is seen as mental programming patterns of thinking and feeling, and potential acting. As culture is often seen as the key inhibitor of effective knowledge sharing the changes organization experience results to transformation, absorption and adaptation of new ways of doing things which ranges from technologies and structure. Knowledge sharing is basically the act of making knowledge available to others within the organization. Knowledge sharing between individuals is the process by which knowledge held by an individual is converted into a form that can be understood, absorbed, and used by other individuals. This study intend to achieve the following objectives, to identify the best understanding and internalizing approach of the practice and concept of knowledge sharing, to determine the barriers of knowledge sharing in organization (both visible and invisible dimension) and to ascertain the best practices of overcoming the cultural barriers of knowledge sharing and innovation in organization. Then the study reiterates that the process of sharing may result in knowledge acquisition by other individuals within the organization. Knowledge sharing between individuals thus results in individual learning, which in turn may contribute to organizational learning. And to share knowledge is to solve practical business problems and employees has to be assured that even if they share their very specific or tacit knowledge with others, their position in the not endangered. Organization can share knowledge through making it directly part of the business strategy, piggyback, and routinely as the way they work. And the discovered barriers include cultural wall, lack of trust, lack of absorption capacities in recipients, individual and social barriers. Other barriers are technological, and failure to develop a transactive memory system. However, overcoming the barriers demands the organization building trusting relationships, link and transfer of knowledge in a centralized repository and its accessibility. The study recommends that organization should endeavour to link sharing knowledge to widely held core values. By linking with core values of the organization values, they will make sharing knowledge consistent with peers’ expectations and managers’ considerations.