Knowledge Management and Organizational Culture in a Software Organization - a Case Study

Software development activities are usually knowledge intensive. Knowledge management is essential to foster improvements and innovation on software development processes. Organizational Culture (OC) is a key factor that impacts the success of knowledge management, since it influences the way employees learn and share knowledge in the organization. The Competing Values Framework (CVF) was proposed to support the definition of organization's cultural outline. CVF aims to diagnose and facilitate Organizational Culture changes. Previous researches presented a theoretical model to correlate knowledge management to the CVF. However, the existing literature does not present evidences of this correlation. The goal of this work is to identify whether this correlation exists or not in the context of a software organization by means of a case study. We performed a comparison between the values obtained and those presented in the theoretical model. The comparison output enabled us to verify that the case study results diverged from the theoretical ones. Therefore, it was not possible to observe the theoretical model's propositions on the investigated software development organization.