Corporate South Africa: making multicultural knowledge sharing work

Nicozaan Finestone · Retha Snyman

86 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Knowledge Management

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Knowledge Management and Sharing Management and Organizational Practices Global and Cross-Cultural Management

Abstract

Purpose Knowledge management in South Africa is still a very new field of management and knowledge managers are experiencing difficulties with the added dimension of multiculturalism. The history of South Africa, along with its current focus on cultural equality, complicates the matter. This research seeks to look at the challenges facing knowledge managers in a multicultural South African corporate environment. Design/methodology/approach An exploratory study, using in‐depth interviewing and a focus group as information collection methods, was launched to explore South African knowledge‐management practices in a cross‐section of companies in the economy. Findings Results showed that companies were afraid to acknowledge cultural differences because of major cultural sensitivity and, as a result, corporate culture was seen as the great equaliser of cultural exchanges. Knowledge managers, along with top management's support, must rather create a cooperative knowledge‐sharing environment in which South Africa's diverse cultures can interact, learn from one another and innovate. Research limitations/implications Serves as a pilot study that aims to explore new territory. From this explorative research, a new and extensive study of the contributing factors should be conducted. This study does not proclaim to be representative of all companies, as only a cross‐section of the South African corporate market was targeted for participation. Practical implications Company management and knowledge workers will see the necessity of incorporating different approaches to knowledge‐management implementation to suit individual needs. Originality/value Very little research has been done on this subject from a South African corporate‐environment perspective. These researchers hope to make knowledge workers more sensitive to the influence of multiculturalism on potential implementation of a knowledge‐management strategy.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 86 citations exist upstream.

References

1992Corporate Culture and Performance 1996The knowing organization: How organizations use information to construct meaning, create knowledge and make decisions 1996Making Differences Matter: A New Paradigm for Managing Diversity 2001A knowledge‐based theory of the firm to guide in strategy formulation 2001Common knowledge: how companies thrive by sharing what they know 2002Cross-Cultural Management: A Knowledge Management Perspective 2000The Management Implications of Ethnicity in South Africa 2002Diversity in the library and information workplace: a South African perspective

Cited by

2013Assessing the Effects of Cultural Intelligence on Team Knowledge Sharing From a Socio‐Cognitive Perspective 2007National culture and the standardization versus adaptation of knowledge management 2009Information management as an enabler of knowledge management maturity: A South African perspective 2014Dancing in the dark: creativity, knowledge creation and (emergent) organizational change 2009Macro and micro challenges for talent retention in South Africa

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.