Relationship between organizational cultures, information technology involvement, degrees of knowledge management Implementations and performance of new product developments

Abstract

This study treated the high-tech industry as the subjects and probes into the correlation among organizational cultures, information technology involvement, degrees of knowledge management activities and performance of new product developments. The subjects of this research were Taiwan's high-tech firms in the Hsinchu Science-Based Industrial Park and Southern Taiwan Science-Based Industrial Park. The respondents were the project members or senior managers involved, currently or previously, in the development of new products. The design of the questionnaire items was based on literature review. The results reveal that the higher the degrees of information technology involvement and organizational cultures, the more significant the influence on the implementation of knowledge management activities and performances of new product developments. The better the implementation of knowledge management activities, the stronger the positive influence on the performance of new product developments. Different organization cultural types (i.e., rational cultures, hierarchical cultures, group cultures and developmental cultures) do not report any significantly different levels of influence on the implementation of knowledge management activities or performance of new product developments. This study suggested that to enhance the performance of new product developments, it is necessary to strengthen information technology involvement and the implementation of knowledge management activities, as well as to integrate the characteristics of the four cultural types in the competing values framework and to enhance the implementation under these four cultural types. © 2010 Asian Network for Scientific Information.