CULTURAL IMPACT ON KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT PROCESS AFFECTING PROJECT MANAGEMENT PRACTICE

Knowledge management (KM) is one of the useful management tools in today's project management (PM) practice, such as construction projects. Nobody can deny the importance of "useful knowledge" always helps organizations and project managers shaping a decision. Due to the trend of globalization, it is now very common that an organization may comprise employees from different countries of distinct national-cultures working together. It is also not uncommon that different projects, within an organization, may have their own organizational-cultures which influence its knowledge repository, transfer process and knowledge strategy. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to align all these cultures and consolidate them to benefit the KM process and PM practice. Organizations and project managers understand that different national-cultural and organizational-cultural factors will create impact on the philosophy of KM process which will subsequently affect PM practice. Those factors may affect interpersonal relations and exchange of knowledge between projects and amongst staff. Systematic KM process can utilize the goodness of different employees from distinct cultures which can eventually drive the organization and projects to success. The purpose of this paper, based upon a case study of a Hong Kong construction company, is to discuss how those cultural factors are linked to KM and what organization and project managers can do to improve the KM process and PM practice.