The knowledge management (KM) literature in general is short on field evidence concerning knowledge sharing (KS) practices in project management settings, where knowledge occupies a central place. In addition, research on KS enablers and barriers has largely overlooked the fact that individual characteristics may influence the choice to share knowledge. This research explored departmental KS practices, enablers and barriers at a Middle-Eastern project management company. It also investigated the influence of a number of individual characteristics on KS, enablers and barriers. The findings confirm that Knowledge is partially shared within departments, and the employees have varying views on KS enablers and barriers. Although many do not perceive organizational enablers as catalysts for KS, they somewhat believe that the information technology (IT) enablers do facilitate KS. The employees, however, do not believe that the identified individual, organizational and IT barriers hinder KS. In addition, gender, age, department type and job type have varying effects on the perceived KS practices, organizational enablers, and IT enablers and barriers. These findings and their implications are further discussed in the paper.

In most of today’s academic circles, faculty knowledge is rarely shared with colleagues in the same institution in any meaningful or systematic way. This investigation sought answers to two questions regarding the faculty’s perceived knowledge sharing (KS) barriers and the influence that KS barriers may have on KS effectiveness. A data set was collected from seventy-six faculty members. The analysis revealed four key KS barriers, as bounded individual capacity is the most perceived barrier to KS, followed by inadequate organizational capability, fear of knowledge revelation, and knowledge nature. Fear of knowledge revelation was found to be the most influential barrier on KS effectiveness, as it influences three of the four KS effectiveness measures, namely awareness of research activities in one’s department, sharing of research knowledge with others in the institution, and satisfaction with sharing research knowledge with others in the institution. These findings contribute to the growing empirical KS research and provide an appropriate foundation for decision making and policy formulation aiming at fostering KS effectiveness in academe.

Increasing interest exists in understanding the factors that explain knowledge transfer capacity (KTC) at the societal level. In this paper, the authors posit that national culture may explain the differences among countries in their knowledge transfer capacities. The authors adopt House and colleagues’ (2004) national culture taxonomy as the theoretical framework to derive and test eighteen hypotheses relating national culture values and practices to societal KTC. KTC correlates positively with gender egalitarianism values, uncertainty avoidance practices, and future orientation practices. KTC also correlates negatively with uncertainty avoidance values, future orientation values, institutional collectivism values, in-group collectivism values, humane orientation practices, in-group collectivism values and practices, and power distance practices. Further analysis using gross domestic product (GDP) as a control variable revealed that only humane orientation practices influence KTC. The research findings are discussed, research limitations are identified, and implications are drawn.

Management research has often overlooked the role of knowledge and knowledge management (KM) in the analysis of organizations and their performance. Also, the literature on KM is short of empirical evidence on the likely interrelatedness of the KM processes. This investigation adopted a research model and used data from 38 Egyptian software firms to examine: (1) the relationship of the KM processes of knowledge acquisition, documentation, transfer, creation, and application to organizational performance, and (2) a number of relationships within the KM processes themselves. The results suggest that knowledge application influences organizational performance, knowledge acquisition and knowledge creation influence knowledge application, and knowledge acquisition and knowledge transfer influence knowledge creation. Although they provide a limited support to the research mode, the results signify the value of continued examination and enhancement of such a model.

This investigation explored knowledge acquisition and transfer practice in the Egyptian software firms. It used a combination of a cross-sectional field survey of 38 firms and an in-depth qualitative analysis of 14 firms. Although most of the firms in the sample recognized the importance of knowledge, their idiosyncrasies appeared to affect the way knowledge is acquired and transferred. The firms were found to have a limited use of their software developers’ initiatives, R&D, and the academic and research institutions as sources for knowledge acquisition. They were also found to have limited capabilities in transferring and sharing knowledge. The Egyptian culture is rich in the social and emotional capital, which can play an important role in building relationships, facilitating the exchange of knowledge, and sharing of experience. Egyptian software firms should develop and implement KM strategies that attract expert software developers, capitalize on trust and social relationships, and build IT-based KM systems in order to enable knowledge acquisition and transfer.

Most of the empirical evidence on the effectiveness of information systems and their determinants is confined to the use of data from Western countries. Evidence from other environments, where the social, economic, and cultural characteristics vary, is needed before generalizations can be made. This paper reports on an investigation designed to explore the relationship of three organizational factors—top management support, user involvement, and the maturity of the IS function—to systems effectiveness in an Egyptian setting. Data was collected from 214 managers, and the results indicate that the three organizational variables positively associate with systems effectiveness, measured by user information satisfaction and system use in improving decision making. Also, user’s tenure in the organization and ownership type were found to affect the relationships between the system’s effectiveness measures and the three organizational variables. These findings are discussed and implications are offered. The findings of this study suggest that the positive relationships of top management support, user involvement, and IS maturity to systems effectiveness may transcend cultural differences. This empirical evidence contributes to the external and international validity of the similar Western-based findings, which, in turn, add to the efforts toward building a general theory of trans-national global information systems (GISs).