A study toward the investigation of the impacts of leadership and organizational culture on knowledge management in companies

VI ABSTRACT Knowledge has become the most important strategic resource for both the knowledge society and the knowledge economy of the 21st century. Knowledge is now accepted as an essential part of production factors, such as capital and labor. Therefore, the companies which manage knowledge systematically and create added-vale from knowledge will gain competitive advantage. In order to reach their objectives, companies need to obtain, keep, share and use knowledge successfully. There are some factors affecting effective and the successful use of knowledge management. Those factors has classified by researchers as 'soft' issues, which include 'leadership' as well as 'organizational culture', and 'hard' issues, which include 'technology' and 'measurement'. This study aims to investigate the relationship between leadership and organizational culture as well as knowledge management in Turkish companies. In addition, the following sub-objectives have been also investigated: attitudes of company managers towards knowledge, level of success in knowledge management, leadership and organizational culture about knowledge, the relationship between these issues and knowledge management. Top 500 industrial companies of Turkey, which were announced by Istanbul Chamber of Industry has been investigated in this research. The necessary data has been collected from those companies through a questionnaire. Frequency, reliability, correlation and factor analyses have been utilized for the statistical examination of the data. The results of the factor analysis show that while leadership factor includes support from upper management and knowledge leadership with strategy and vision, organizational culture factor includes trust, and reward and recognition systems, and finally knowledge management factor includes gaining, storage, sharing and usage of knowledge. The relationship between leadership and organizational culture as well as knowledge management has been also tested through correlation tests. The results highlight that there is a relatively positive relation between leadership and organizational culture as well as knowledge management in Turkish companies.