Barriers to km between organisational cultures in the face of concurrent enterprising: How to overcome them?

Abstract

There is evidence that the way Knowledge Management is practised is strongly dependellt on the cultural context in which it is embedded. In Concurrent/Extended Enterprises different cultures, and therefore different ways of dealing with the resource 'knowledge', collide and a new meta-culture evolves along the course of the co-operation. If the co-operating cultures are too heterogeneous and the evolved meta-culture is not capable of handling the discrepancies of the colliding organisational cultures, the co-operation runs the risk of failing. Therefore, cultural barriers to Knowledge Management must be identified and overcome. In the face of increasing application of the methods and tools of virtual organisations in co-operations, which are typically the increase of IC-technologies, the consideration of the cultural dimension becomes even more important due to the limited communication richness these technologies provide in contrast to face-to-face meetings. The authors present a multi-layered framework for classifying cultural barriers in Concurrent Enterprises as a common type of virtual co-operations. Further, the authors look at the cultural barriers to be overcome before companies actually engage in co-operations. These barriers were identified by the means of semi-structured interviews. In addition first ideas for how to overcome them will be provided. © 2004 by Springer Science+Business Media New York.