Investigation and prioritisation of cultural barriers against implementation of knowledge management in Kerman Regional Electric Company

On the way knowledge management (KM) implementation in organisations, there are many obstacles, in which an important one is cultural barrier. Kerman Regional Electric Company (KREC) is selected for identifying and prioritising KM implementation barriers because it is intended to implement it. This research can be, in terms of objectives, categorised as an applied study. Since this research was conducted with the aim to describe the status of KM in the studied organisation and considered data collected through distributing questionnaires, in terms of method, it is a descriptive survey. By analysing multiple studies, six factors (lack of leadership support, lack of trust, lack of an appropriate reward system, lack of cooperation among employees, lack of an appropriate learning system, lack of an appropriate formalisation system) were selected as cultural barriers. And the data were gathered by distributing some questionnaires between employees of the KREC. Data were analysed using Kolmogorov‐Smirnov, Spearman and Friedman tests. The effect of all the six aforementioned factors on KM implementation was approved. Among them, lack of an appropriate formalisation system is known to be the most important barrier and lack of an appropriate learning system is identified as the least significant barrier in implementation of KM.