Effects of Coworkers' Helping Behavior on Employees' Knowledge Sharing and Creativity: The Moderating Role of Interactional Justice.

Soojin Lee,Gukdo Byun,Suzi Kim

doi:10.3390/ijerph182413302

Abstract

Although it is important to examine how creative performance can be achieved by facilitating knowledge sharing activities among its members, few studies have examined these relationships. Therefore, this study analyzed the effects of coworkers’ helping behavior on knowledge sharing and creativity. It also attempted to demonstrate the moderating role of interactional justice as a situational variable that positively affects coworkers’ helping behavior. Using data from 200 full-time supervisor–subordinate dyads in a large public institution located in South Korea, we performed multiple regression analysis and the bootstrapping method to test our hypotheses. The results of this study presented that coworkers’ helping behavior encouraged individuals to share knowledge and increase their creative performance. Moreover, this study demonstrated that the positive effect of coworkers’ helping behavior on employees’ creativity through their knowledge sharing was stronger when interactional justice was high rather than low. Therefore, this research contributes to finding the critical factors that enable a company to gain a competitive advantage by providing the impact of coworkers’ helping behavior and supervisors’ interactional justice on knowledge sharing and creativity among employees.

Highlights

Rapid technological developments and a changing global order have rendered securing a sustainable competitive advantage essential for the survival of an organization [1]
Based on previous research, which reported that employee creativity increased when information or feedback was exchanged among coworkers [13], this study demonstrates the positive relationship between coworkers’ helping behavior and employee creativity
Combining the arguments underlying Hypotheses 1 and 2, we propose that coworkers’ helping behavior is positively related to employees’ knowledge sharing, which will lead to higher levels of employee creativity

Summary

Introduction

Rapid technological developments and a changing global order have rendered securing a sustainable competitive advantage essential for the survival of an organization [1]. A critical contributor to an organization’s competitive advantage is employee creativity [2,3], based on which it seeks to make important changes and innovations [4]. The creative performance of employees is a strategy to ensure an organization’s innovative behavior, productivity, and survival [5]. Creative performance is generated and expanded by sharing and re-integrating employees’ knowledge [6]. Some researchers have suggested that knowledge sharing is deeply related to innovative behavior and plays an important role in improving organizational competitiveness [8]

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Methods

Discussion

Conclusion