Communication Climate and Organisational Knowledge Sharing

This paper reports research on the role of communication in knowledge management, examined through the lens of communication climate. The research is being undertaken in a major public sector organisation. The organisation wishes to shift its culture to one characterised by internal information sharing and, to this end, it has undertaken a 3-year knowledge management initiative that comprises an integrated suite of formal and informal knowledge sharing activities. The research is being conducted on a longitudinal basis between 2003 and 2005, and results of the first survey of the organisation's communication climate are reported in this paper. It is proposed that communication audits can be used to gauge whether knowledge and information sharing are likely to occur by providing data on two antecedents to such sharing: perceptions of other organisational members' openness to the receiving as well as the sending aspects of sharing.