اثرات انگیزه های فردی و سرمایه اجتماعی بر اهداف اشتراک گذاری دانش ضمنی و صریح کارکنان

Due to the importance of knowledge in today's competitive world, an understanding of how to enhance employee knowledge sharing has become critical. This study develops an integrated model to understand key factors of employee knowledge sharing intentions through constructs prescribed by two established knowledge management research streams, namely, those concerning individual motivations and social capital. This study classifies employee knowledge sharing intentions as either tacit or explicit and investigates whether the level of the determinants and their influences differ between the two. The research model is tested with survey data collected from 2010 employees in multiple industries. Analysis results show that the proposed model significantly explains the variance of employees’ tacit and explicit knowledge sharing intentions. This finding indicates that the model's unified perspective enhances our knowledge of how to improve employee knowledge sharing. The new findings reveal that organizational rewards have a negative effect on employees’ tacit knowledge sharing intentions but a positive influence on their explicit knowledge sharing intentions. The analysis results confirm that reciprocity, enjoyment, and social capital contribute significantly to enhancing employees’ tacit and explicit knowledge sharing intentions. Additionally, these factors have more positive effects on tacit than on explicit knowledge intentions. The implications of the new findings are discussed.

Knowledge sharing is critical to a firm's success in today's highly competitive environment (Grant, 1996). Effectively encouraging employees to share useful knowledge across the organization can increase and sustain a firm's competitive advantages (Barney, 1991, Grant, 1996 and Liu and Phillips, 2011). Numerous studies on organization and knowledge management (KM) have proven that employee knowledge sharing enhances firm performance such as absorptive capacity and innovation capability (e.g., Liao et al., 2007a and Liu and Phillips, 2011). Choi, Lee, and Yoo (2010) have shown that knowledge sharing among team members is essential in maintaining high levels of group and organizational productivity. Since employees’ knowledge sharing intentions are one of the strong predictors of actual employee knowledge sharing behaviour (Ajzen, 1988 and Ajzen, 1991), many researchers have studied its various contributing factors. Previous studies, however, seem to be limited in that they did not address the type of knowledge to be shared. Knowledge shared among employees can be classified as either tacit or explicit (Dhanaraj et al., 2004, Nonaka, 1994 and Reychav and Weisberg, 2009). Tacit knowledge is not easily codified or articulated because it is embedded in an individual's brain or experience, such as know-how or skill (Nonaka, 1994). On the other hand, explicit knowledge is easily expressed and communicated in the form of written documents, such as reports or manuals (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). Therefore, tacit knowledge is harder than explicit knowledge to share among employees, since sharing it costs significantly more time and effort (Dhanaraj et al., 2004, Ipe, 1998 and Reychav and Weisberg, 2010). This implies that the knowledge sharing enablers of previous studies may have had different effects on tacit or explicit knowledge sharing intentions because people are likely to adjust their knowledge sharing intentions according to the different resource requirements of tacit and explicit knowledge sharing activities. Therefore, the objective of this study is to re-examine the impact of major knowledge sharing antecedents of employees’ tacit and explicit knowledge sharing intentions. The major knowledge sharing antecedents to be re-examined fall into two categories: individual and social. Within the individual category, employees’ extrinsic and intrinsic motivations are the basis of the growth of their knowledge sharing intentions (Hung et al., 2011a, Hung et al., 2011b, Kankanhalli et al., 2005 and Lin, 2007a). Prior KM studies have pointed out organizational rewards and reciprocity as salient extrinsic motivation (Bock et al., 2005, Chennamaneni et al., 2012 and Lin, 2007b) and enjoyment as critical intrinsic motivation (Chennamaneni et al., 2012, Hung et al., 2011b, Lin, 2007a and Wasko and Faraj, 2000). Regarding the social category, since knowledge sharing consists of social interactions between employees (Chow and Chan, 2008 and Lin, 2007a) and such interactions are influenced by the relationships between individuals (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998), employee social capital has been known to play a major role in forming their knowledge sharing intentions (Chang and Chuang, 2011, Chow and Chan, 2008 and He et al., 2009). Since the impact of these knowledge sharing antecedents on tacit or explicit knowledge sharing has not been yet verified in the literature, this study tries to answer the following three research questions: (i) What are the effects of individual motivation factors such as organization rewards, reciprocity, and enjoyment on employees’ tacit and explicit knowledge sharing intentions? (ii) What are the effects of social capital on employees’ tacit and explicit knowledge sharing intentions? (iii) How do individual motivation factors and social capital differ in their respective impacts on employees’ tacit and explicit knowledge sharing intentions? This remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the study's theoretical background. Section 3 describes the research model and hypotheses. Section 4 explains the research methodology. Section 5 examines the research results. Section 6 discusses the implications of the results. Section 7 provides the conclusion and limitations of this research.

The purpose of this study was to re-examine the effects of individual motivations and social capital on employees’ tacit and explicit knowledge sharing intentions. By discerning employees’ knowledge sharing intentions according to the type of knowledge to be shared, whether tacit or explicit, this study has empirically provided new findings of the respective impacts of organizational rewards, reciprocity, enjoyment and social capital on employees’ knowledge sharing intentions, which prior research has ignored so far. The new findings will be very useful to deepening and widening our understanding of the respective role of individual motivations and social capital in employees’ knowledge sharing intentions. Despite its new findings, this study has the following limitations, which may be addressed and overcome by future research. Although this study concentrates on individual motivations and social capital as major antecedents to employees’ tacit and explicit knowledge sharing intentions, many other factors may also be involved. For instance, this study did not address or analyse the potential moderating effects such as the type of industry sector (e.g., the government sector versus the private sector) or knowledge sharing context of the participating organizations (whether they are online system-driven or off-line community-driven, etc.). Since this study adopted a cross-sectional survey method of data collection, it may not have fully captured the dynamism of the formation of employees’ tacit and explicit knowledge sharing intentions. Because our results represent only a snapshot thereof, further researchers may consider adopting a longitudinal data collection method which will enable them to investigate the effects of the antecedents of employees’ tacit and explicit knowledge sharing intentions from a dynamic perspective.