Abstract
Objectives: The study examined and identified the factors that affect lawyers’ attitudes to knowledge sharing, and their knowledge sharing behaviour. Specifically, it investigated the relationship between the salient beliefs affecting the knowledge sharing attitude of lawyers’, and applied a modified version of the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) in the knowledge sharing context, to predict how these factors affect their knowledge sharing behaviour.Method: A field survey of 273 lawyers was carried out, using questionnaire for data collection. Collected data on all variables were structured into grouped frequency distributions. Principal Component Factor Analysis was applied to reduce the constructs and Simple Regression was applied to test the hypotheses. These were tested at 0.05% level of significance.Results: Results showed that expected associations and contributions were the major determinants of lawyers’ attitudes towards knowledge sharing. Expected reward was not significantly related to lawyers’ attitudes towards knowledge sharing. A positive attitude towards knowledge sharing was found to lead to a positive intention to share knowledge, although a positive intention to share knowledge did not significantly predict a positive knowledge sharing behaviour. The level of Information Technology (IT) usage was also found to significantly affect the knowledge sharing behaviour of lawyers’.Conclusion: It was recommended that law firms in the study area should deploy more IT infrastructure and services that encourage effective knowledge sharing amongst lawyers.
Highlights
The acquisition, application, and leveraging of knowledge are important for organisations to achieve success
An interesting finding in this study is the expected rewards variable, as this is a factor that affects knowledge sharing amongst lawyers in the surveyed law firms
King and Iyoha (2008) emphasised that there had to be something that motivated the employees willingness to share their knowledge for the benefit of the organisation, stating that if the employees were not motivated, their knowledge may never be shared with others
Summary
The acquisition, application, and leveraging of knowledge are important for organisations to achieve success. Knowledge management comprises a range of practices applied by organisations to identify, create, represent, distribute and enable them to adopt what they know and how they know it, and these practices are tied to organisational objectives and goals. It is imperative for workers in an organisation to have a constructive attitude to sharing knowledge in order for the organisation to be successful. Face and content validity of the instrument was carried out by researchers in the area of knowledge sharing They thoroughly reviewed the content of the questionnaire, and the extent to which it was likely to measure the variables. A total of 273 copies were used for data analyses
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