The Role of a Strong Corporate Mission for Knowledge Management

This research, using large questionnaire data collected from a Japanese pharmaceutical company, attempts to examine the impact of organisational culture, leadership, and reporting styles on knowledge management, which can support innovation, assessing the significance of levels of comprehension and implementation of the corporate mission. Those with a better understanding and consistent realisation of the corporate mission were found to spend significantly more time on knowledge management activities, suggesting that the organisation should better communicate the corporate mission to employees and translate it into clear objectives.Moreover, these results have revealed discriminate enablers of knowledge management among employees with higher levels of comprehension and implementation of the corporate mission and those with lower levels. In the former group, time spent on knowledge management activities was solely the result of organisational culture, while in the latter, involvement in knowledge management was the product of both high open-mindedness and more inclusive reporting. These findings suggest first that a strong mission shared and put into practice among the workforce is a powerful driver of knowledge management, and second, that open-mindedness and more inclusive reporting can substitute for a strong corporate mission and support knowledge management activities.