Evaluating Barriers to Organizational Culture and Knowledge Sharing for Designing a Knowledge Sharing Infrastructure: a Case Study

Organizational culture is considered of outmost importance in bringing change into an organization. It has a special influence on knowledge organization and organizational behavior. It helps organizations in enhancing integrated services, resource sharing, organizational learning and organizational creativity. Thus, this study aims at analyzing the status of the organizational culture from the knowledge sharing perspective among university staff and faculty members as an important capital.

This study is categorized as an applied study which has been carried out using two questionnaires. One of these questionnaires dealt with organizational culture and the other dealt with the barriers to knowledge sharing. These questionnaires were distributed among 63 staff and faculty members of the Faculty of Education and Psychology at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. Descriptive and inferential statistics were conducted in analyzing data.

The results show that there is a significant difference among subcultures of the population. It is also evident that bureaucratic, corporate, and flexibility are dominant among the population, respectively. Furthermore, human factors and the leadership are considered among the most important barriers of knowledge sharing.

Since the bureaucratic subculture is predominant among the population and according to the relationships identified between faculty members' subcultures and different barriers to the knowledge sharing, it is imperative to rely more often on leadership potentials and executive agents.