Examining the Role of Childhood Experiences in Developing Altruistic and Knowledge Sharing Behaviors among Children in Their Later Life: A Partial Least Squares (PLS) Path Modeling Approach

Imran Ali,Thamer Baazeem,Saeed Badghish,Murad Ali

doi:10.3390/su10020292

Abstract

Previous research on child development advocates that motivating children to make a choice to forfeit their own toys with others develop sharing behavior in later life. Borrowing the conceptual background from the child development theory, this study proposes a model of knowledge sharing behavior among individuals at the workplace. The study proposes a unique conceptual model that integrates the cognitive/behavioral, and other childhood theories to explain the knowledge sharing behavior among individuals. The study uses psychological, cognitive, behavioral and social learning theories to explain the development of altruistic behavior in childhood as a determinant of knowledge sharing behavior. This study develops and empirically tests a research framework which explains the role of childhood experiences in developing altruistic behavior among children and the translation of this altruistic behavior into knowledge sharing behavior later in their professional life. This study explores those relationships using PLS-SEM with data from 310 individuals from Pakistan. The study concludes the role of parents and child-rearing practices as central in developing children’s altruistic attitude that leads to knowledge sharing behavior in their later life. The implications and future research directions are discussed in details.

Highlights

During the last few decades, scholarly community provides a platform for discussing challenges pertaining to contemporary issues in innovation and knowledge [1,2,3,4,5,6]
PLS-Structural equation modeling (SEM) has its distinct features compared to covariance-based SEM (CB-SEM)
partial least squares SEM (PLS-SEM) does not have minimal requirements of the restrictive assumptions such as measurement scales, sample size, and distributional assumptions imposed by CB-SEM [83]

Summary

Introduction

During the last few decades, scholarly community provides a platform for discussing challenges pertaining to contemporary issues in innovation and knowledge [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Organizations invest significant amount of resources to use knowledge as competitive advantage to increase efficiency and find innovative solutions for customers [15,16]. Knowledge sharing is important facet of knowledge management because it leads to increased exploitation and exploration of knowledge resources by employees and improves innovative performance at individual, team, and organizational levels [13,20,21,22,23,24,25,26]. There is call for research to investigate the factors that motivate or facilitate employees to share knowledge, in order to yield superior efficiency from knowledge management systems within organizations [27]. LMX), and at individual levels (personality traits, self-efficacy, impression management)

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Conclusion