Dear all,

I intent to use Repertory Grids in order to elicit the corporate culture
of a firm. I am especially interested in those cultural values that
explain the way how the employees communicate and share their knowledge
(knowledge sharing-culture).

I thought of using situations where the interviewee experienced
knowledge sharing/communication within the firm and some situations from
outside the firm as elements for the grid. For the elicitation of the
situations within the firm I would ask the interviewee to think of a
wide range of situations:
* typical situations and atypical (unexpected positive or negative
outcome) situations
* and of situations where knowledge sharing happened (or not) between
people of 1) the same hierarchical level (colleagues) or of 2) different
hierarchical levels (superior-subordinate) and 3) between people from
within the company with people from outside the company (communications
with customers, suppliers, partners).

In my try-out, it was sometimes difficult to gather situations from
outside the firm, because some people did only work in this firm and
have no former experience in other firms (or the concreteness of the
experience is lacking because they left the former firm 10 years ago),
and private situations are sometimes too private to include them in a
study of corporate culture.

I tried that procedure out, but the constructs I got were not very
satisfying, because they were not on the level of cultural values.
Examples of constructs in the try-out are:
* formal versus informal communication,
* face-to-face situation versus written document,
* two people involved versus more people involved... etc.

I don't have the feeling that I get nearer to culture by analysing those
constructs. (Of course the situations themselves give me already some
hints, but I would like to try to get deeper into the underlying values
level of culture.)

Do you have any ideas, comments on the procedure? Any suggestions what
could be changed in order to get answers (constructs) that describe the
knowledge-sharing-culture of the firm?

Any ideas, feedback, comments are cordially welcome.

Jeannette Hemmecke

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Jeannette Hemmecke
Psychologist

University of Linz
Department for Communications Engineering
Freistaedter Str. 315
4040 Linz
Austria

mailto:jeannette.hemmecke@...
http://www.ce.jku.at
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Competence Centre for Knowledge Management
http://wissen.ce.jku.at
...................................
Private
mailto:jeannette@...
http://www.hemmecke.de/jeannette
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