“Corporate Culture and Knowledge Management”

Corporate Culture refers to "the way we do things around here".
It also refers to the "widely shared philosophy" in an organization.

The diagram below shows the components of a corpoarte culture.

Culture Characterizations

There are atleast three kinds of organizational cultures, namely Hero Based Cultures, Family Based Cultures and Enterpreneurial Cultures.

Their differences are as follows:

Culture Characterization	Description
Hero Based Culture	values member of an organization who perform suprehuman tasks or heroic feats receive adulation of their peers remunerated accordingly for the task usually occurs in a small team (i.e., five to ten people)
Family Based Cultures	those which look after the group as a whole an example is the "nurturing" culture in HP which was instilled by the founders decades ago
Enterpreneurial Cultures	where each employee is encouraged to think about the company as if it were their own some examples are consulting companies and legal partnerships

"Power-Distance Cultures" versus "Empowered Cultures"

Power-distance cultures' attributes would typically include:

• where there is power and distance between the higher and lower members of the organization
• characterized as masculine
• management via hierarchy and supervision
• very controlled culture
• individuals are not encouraged to be entrepreneurial or innovative

Empowered cultures' attributes would typically include:

• individuals share power
• characterized as feminine
• sense of responsibility and involvement among members
• decision making across the organization not just on top
• knowledge sharing philosophy