A study on relationship between organizational culture and information technology on knowledge sharing

Article history: Received January 20, 2014 Accepted 30 August 2014 Available online September 15 2014 This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of organizational culture and information technology on knowledge sharing in national foundation of computer games (NFCG) located in city of Tehran, Iran. The proposed study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale, distributes it among 55 selected people who work for NFCG, which consists of three categories of organizational culture, information technology and knowledge sharing and Cronbach alphas are calculated as 0.869, 0.707 and 0.773, respectively. Using ANOVA test, the study has determined a positive and meaningful relationship between organizational cultures and knowledge sharing. However, the study has not determined any positive and meaningful relationship between information technology and knowledge sharing. Furthermore, while the results of the study have not indicated any meaningful relationships between trust, employee communication on one side and knowledge sharing on the other side, there were positive and meaningful relationships between reward system and organizational structure on one side and knowledge sharing on the other side. © 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Knowledge sharing Organizational culture Trust Reward system IT


Introduction
Knowledge has been a controversial debate in western philosophy for years (Betz, 2001).During the past several years, there has been a growing interest in considering knowledge as an organizational asset.Information sharing (IS) researchers have begun promoting a class of information systems stated as as knowledge management systems (KMS).The primary objective of KMS is to provide some support on creation, transformation, and application of knowledge in all sorts of firms.Effective development and implementation of KMS needs a foundation in various rich literatures.To be credible, KMS research and development have to preserve and construct on the literature, which exists in various but related fields.Alavi and Leidner (2001) presented a comprehensive review and interpretation of knowledge management literatures in various fields with the focus towards determining the important areas for research.They presented a detailed process view of organizational knowledge management with a concentration on the potential role of information technology in this process.Hicks et al. (2007) investigated the current thoughts on knowledge management (KM).They developed a metaphor to combination of these thoughts in a new way that effectively conveyed various kinds of knowledge and ways of managing it.According to Christensen (2007), Knowledge sharing is the best method for moving away from the obsession with best practices.

The proposed study
This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of organizational culture and information technology on knowledge sharing (Al Busaidi et al., 2010;Daft, 2006) in national foundation of computer games (NFCG) located in city of Tehran, Iran.The proposed study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale, distributes it among 55 selected people who work for NFCG, which consists of three categories of organizational culture, information technology (Davenport & Prusak, 1998) and knowledge sharing (Huysman & Wulf, 2006) and Cronbach alphas are calculated as 0.869, 0.707 and 0.773, respectively.The results of these values are well above the minimum acceptable level of 0.70.Therefore, we can confirm the overall questionnaire of the survey.There are two main hypotheses as well as four sub-hypotheses associated with the proposed study of this paper (Fig. 1).

First main hypothesis:
There is a positive and meaningful relationship between knowledge sharing and organizational culture.

Second main hypothesis:
There is a positive and meaningful relationship between information technology and knowledge sharing.
There are four sub-hypotheses associated with the proposed study of this paper as follows, 2.1.There is a meaningful and positive relationship between trust and knowledge sharing.
2.2.There is a meaningful and positive relationship between employee communication and knowledge sharing.
2.3.There is a meaningful and positive relationship between reward system and knowledge sharing.   1, all components of the survey are normally distributed.

The results
In this section, we present details of our findings on testing various hypotheses of the survey.

The first hypothesis: The relationship between organizational culture and knowledge sharing
The first hypothesis of the survey investigates the relationship between organizational culture and knowledge sharing.As we can observe from the results of Table 2, there is a meaningful relationship between organizational culture and knowledge sharing when the level of significance is five percent.Therefore, the first hypothesis of the survey has been confirmed.

The second hypothesis: The relationship between information technology and knowledge sharing
The second hypothesis of the survey studies the relationship between information technology and knowledge sharing.Table 3 shows the results of ANOVA test for testing the first hypothesis of the survey.As we can see from the results of Table 3, there is not any meaningful relationship between information technology and knowledge sharing when the level of significance is five percent.Therefore, the second main hypothesis of the survey has not been confirmed.

The first sub-hypothesis: The relationship between trust and knowledge sharing
The first sub-hypothesis of the survey tries to find out the relationship between trust and knowledge sharing.Table 4 presents the results of ANOVA test for testing the first sub-hypothesis of the survey.As we can see from the results of Table 4, there is not any meaningful relationship between employee trust and knowledge sharing when the level of significance is five percent.Therefore, the first subhypothesis of the survey has not been confirmed.

The second sub-hypothesis: The relationship between communication and knowledge sharing
The second sub-hypothesis of the survey attempts to determine the relationship between employee communication and knowledge sharing.Table 5 shows the results of ANOVA test for testing the second sub-hypothesis of the survey.As we can see from the results of Table 5, there is not any meaningful relationship between employee communication and knowledge sharing when the level of significance is five percent.Therefore, the second sub-hypothesis of the survey has not been confirmed.

The third sub-hypothesis: The relationship between reward system and knowledge sharing
The third sub-hypothesis of the survey investigates the relationship between reward system and knowledge sharing.Table 6 presents the results of ANOVA test for testing the third sub-hypothesis of the survey.As we can observe from the results of Table 6, there is a meaningful relationship between reward system and knowledge sharing when the level of significance is five percent.Therefore, the third subhypothesis of the survey has been confirmed.

The fourth sub-hypothesis: The relationship between organizational structure and knowledge sharing
The fourth sub-hypothesis of the survey investigates the relationship between organizational structure and knowledge sharing.Table 7 shows the results of ANOVA test for testing the fourth subhypothesis of the survey.As we can observe from the results of Table 7, there is a meaningful relationship between organizational structure and knowledge sharing when the level of significance is five percent.Therefore, the fourth sub-hypothesis of the survey has been confirmed.

Conclusion
We have presented an empirical investigation to study the impact of organizational culture and information technology on knowledge sharing in national foundation of computer games (NFCG) located in city of Tehran, Iran.Using ANOVA test, the study has determined a positive and meaningful relationship between organizational cultures and knowledge sharing.However, the study has not determined any positive and meaningful relationship between information technology and knowledge sharing.Furthermore, while the results of the study have not indicated any meaningful relationships between trust, employee communication on one side and knowledge sharing on the other side, there were positive and meaningful relationships between reward system and organizational structure on one side and knowledge sharing on the other side.Based on the results of the survey, we can conclude that reward may increase the employees' motivation to share knowledge and help organization grow faster.
The findings of this survey are somewhat consistent with other studies.Jiacheng et al. (2010), for instance, explored individual cognitive mechanisms of knowledge-sharing (KS) motivation and intends to incorporate more effective measures to judge and effect individual inclinations toward KS in a cross-cultural context in Chinese community.They reported that Chinese had more tendencies to conform to teams' opinions and tend to favor KS as a tool of reaching harmonious relationships, while Americans engaged in KS because self-worth was considered as the manifestation of their individual determinations.The result of our study is not consistent with the results of other studies in terms of trust (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995;Issa & Haddad, 2008;Wang & Noe, 2010).According to Lin (2008), for instance, trust and commitment among units, which are important for facilitating knowledge sharing among units, and creative and supporting characteristics of organizational culture could be beneficial for the implementation of knowledge sharing activities and this is not what this study has found about it.

Table 1
demonstrates the results of Kolmogrove-Smirnove test to verify whether the gathered information.
Table 2 demonstrates the results of Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) test for testing the first hypothesis of the survey.

Table 2
The results of ANOVA test for testing the first hypothesis of the survey

Table 3
The results of ANOVA test for testing the second hypothesis of the survey

Table 4
The results of ANOVA test for testing the first sub-hypothesis of the survey

Table 5
The results of ANOVA test for testing the second sub-hypothesis of the survey

Table 6
The results of ANOVA test for testing the third sub-hypothesis of the survey

Table 7
The results of ANOVA test for testing the fourth sub-hypothesis of the survey