"Knowledge Management and Public Organizations: How well does the coat fit? The case of Greece"

Introduction In today's global environment, change rather than stability is the order of the day. Rapid changes in technology, cultural values, social life, competition and citizen/customers' demands have increased the rate at which organisations need to alter their strategies and structures in order to survive and operate successfully. As the pace of change has increased, the importance of planning, monitoring, and controlling activity has decreased. Thus, nowadays business system tends to move organisations towards a world of work where everything is in flux and where continued learning is the only stable goal. Public as well as private organisations need to have the capacity to be adaptive (to learn the know-how of solving problems) and generate knowledge (to establish new methods of solving problems). In other words, bureaucratic organisations have to be transformed into learning organisations. The role that managers (especially those ones on the middle level) play within every organisational environment has fundamentally reoriented. In order to encourage learning and knowledge creation, managers need to collect, analyse and synthesise information, facilitate adaptability and implement strategic decisions. However, it is still doubtful how far public organisation's managers can shift their actions and develop this three dimensional role. Thus, it is still questionable how far learning and knowledge creation has become an issue in public organisations. This paper seeks to answer the above question contributing to cover the literature gap existing in the field of organisational learning in public sector. More specifically, its purpose is to investigate the role of the middle manager in organisations operating in the Greek public domain. Greece's complex, huge and non-competitive public sector makes the country a very good candidate for the purposes of this study. Greek public organisations are characterised by a long tradition of legal culture, which is associated with an enormous bureaucratic structure. In such an Third European Conference On Organisational Knowledge, learning and Capabilities 2 organisational environment it is very difficult for middle managers to develop new roles and take new actions such as those of knowledge synthesisers and facilitators. Organisational learning (OL) is a process through which managers can adapt, modify and change the organisational environment in order to help organisations survive to an increasingly competitive and continued transforming business system. A learning organisation is an organisation that is open to environmental changes, able to accept those changes, try to analyse them and then to transform them to new actions and strategies. …