Specific influence of knowledge intensive and capital intensive organizations on collaborative climate and knowledge sharing in SMEs

摘要

In this paper, the authors discuss knowledge management, with a focus on knowledge sharing. Knowledge sharing is dependent on trust and cooperation, which are elements of organizational culture. One specific aspect of organizational culture is of particular interest for knowledge sharing. This aspect consists of values, beliefs and atmosphere that characterize common mental space accepted by knowledge workers which affect behavior and readiness to share knowledge. This aspect of organizational culture is called collaborative climate and can be described as the 'permeability' of the human infrastructure for knowledge sharing. Collaborative climate in an organization can be considered as an environment that provides support to knowledge workers to create new knowledge that will be translated into a value, which will become competitive advantage of an organization. A questionnaire for assessing two dimensions of the collaborative climate: Organizational Culture and Employee Attitude was used as an instrument in this research. The main research questions in this paper are: 1) Is there a statistically significant difference between attitudes towards collaborative climate of managers and employees? 2) Is there a statistically significant difference between attitudes towards collaborative climate in capital intensive and knowledge intensive organizations? Research hypotheses emerged from the main research questions.