Organizational culture and knowledge creation capability

Organizational culture comprises a firm's climate that informally and tacitly defines how the firm develops and uses knowledge, thus it has a significant effect on knowledge creation capability. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of organizational culture on knowledge creation capability.

The data of 212 Chinese firms collected through face‐to‐face interview is used to empirically test the hypotheses.

This study finds that organizational culture plays a critical role in knowledge creation capability. Specially, collectivism has a positive impact on knowledge creation capability, while power distance and uncertainty avoidance have negative effects.

This study not only contributes to knowledge management research by identifying a key antecedent of knowledge creation capability – organizational culture – but also is of importance to organizational culture literature by demonstrating the proper organizational culture for knowledge creation capability.