Corporate Culture Influence on Effective Initialization and Application of Knowledge Management in Enterprises

The article deals with the development of a corporate culture creation process model supporting an effective application of knowledge management in enterprises. Actual turbulent changes influenced by the world business depression have created an absolute new set of conditions for the operation of various entrepreneurs. To be able to react to the above mentioned changes and to ensure their continuous sustainable development, it is necessary to optimize their performance in a definite way. Companies must especially become 'operational', which means they must be able and ready to respond quickly, be in a close relationship with the customer, support the business mind by offering operational autonomy and to constantly innovate and be innovative. A fundamental prerequisite for the optimization of an enterprise's performance is in the given conditions that lean on effective knowledge management. The initialization and the subsequent effective application of knowledge management within enterprise is a necessity in order to create an adequate corporate culture. Nowadays the corporate culture is regarded as a decisive pre-requisite for the long-term prosperity of enterprises which enable the company not only to adapt to varied conditions but also to take a competitive advantage of this. Despite the general acceptance of the mentioned postulate, the results of the research carried out in industrial companies that were active in the Slovak Republic during 2007 - 2009 indicates the fact that these companies did not pay sufficient attention to the issue of an optimal culture creation. The approach of enterprises towards the building of their culture (in many cases it is more an outwardly declared effort to change, however without any particular practical outputs) is in a campaign form which means they indeed develop intense but only short-lasting efforts in a determined direction, but these efforts are soon forgotten with time. However, when building an optimal (thus in given conditions that are highly effective) culture it must be a long-term mission which intervenes in the value orientation and development of the company who has a longer horizon during which time the crucial trend of the optimization must enable the initialization and subsequent effective application of knowledge management within enterprises.