A Case Study of the Effect of Organizational Information Culture’s Dimension on Employees’ Tendency to Knowledge Sharing

Knowledge isa combination of experiences, values, contextual information and specific insights that provide a framework for evaluating and interpreting new experiences. Therefore, having knowledgeable people for the organization is a valuable and shared asset that creates significant educational and learning benefits and is a powerful mechanism for improving organizational productivity and survival. Knowledge sharing creates opportunities to maximize the organization's ability to meet needs and increase efficiency to solve problems and achieve competitive advantage. The aim of this study was to determine the effect of organizational information culture dimensions on the tendency to share the knowledge of the staff of the Islamic Azad University of Ahvaz Branch. This study was conducted in terms of research environment in Islamic Azad University of Ahvaz Branch. University is an educational, cultural and research organization that uses a set of specialized forces and uses different information systems has an irreplaceable role in producing knowledge and training efficient human resources for social activities and in this regard seeks to improve their situation. Therefore, it is important to study the component of knowledge sharing and its underlying conditions in order to provide better conditions for the use of this intangible asset.

This research is of applied type and because it sought to use real information and different statistical methods to test the hypotheses, it was done by analytical survey method. The research population was the staff of the Islamic Azad University of Ahvaz Branch, numbered 380 people, which was selected using the Krejcie and Morgan’s sample size determination table and the sample size of 181 people was selected by simple random sampling method. The research data were distributed by distributing a 55-item researcher-made questionnaire based on a study by Choo, et al. (2006), Choo (2013) and Hausmann, Williams, Hardy and Schubert (2014) and Vick, Nagano & Popadiuk (2015) for organizational information culture and Lee, Lee & Kang (2005) and Hemati (2010) for the tendency to share knowledge after confirming the validity and reliability (α = 0.9). Then, the data were entered into SPSS version 21 software and analyzed.

The results showed that the status of the two dimensions of information management and information values ​​and norms are below average and have an unfavorable situation based on the Nunnally sale spectrum (measurement of desirability). However, other dimensions were above average and at a relatively good level. Also, the result of the hypothesis test using Pearson’s correlation coefficient and hierarchical regression showed that organizational information culture has a positive and significant effect (r = 660 and P-Value> 0.05) on the tendency of employees to share knowledge.

Based on the findings, organizational information culture has the ability to predict the tendency of employees to share knowledge. Since most of the problems of organizations regarding knowledge sharing are related to cultural and process issues, paying attention to the dimensions of organizational information culture can help managers identify barriers, change, and improve conditions as a facilitator.