From Intention to Sharing: A Qualitative Study of Barriers to Knowledge Sharing Practices

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Previously, we have published a quantitative study (Kuo & Young, 2008) that reported an intention-action inconsistency in knowledge sharing practices on Internet-based knowledge management system (KMS), called SCTNet. The SCTNet has been put in place to facilitate teachers’ knowledge sharing tasks in Taiwan since 1999. With the aid of the government, over 100,000 registered members, most of whom are teachers, joined SCTNet over a period of ten years. Still, even though most members have indicated their desire to create, store, distribute, and discuss their teaching knowledge, the observed actual activities on SCTNet have been lacking. The teachers undoubtedly possess knowledge potentially useful to others, and they do desire to learn from others in order to fulfill their ever-demanding daily teaching assignments, but they simply fail to enact their desires to conduct knowledge sharing tasks. Our quantitative study, couched in the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980; Ajzen, 1988, 1991, 2002), has investigated four types of volitional control (intention toward behavior, perceived self-efficacy, perceived controllability, action control) mechanisms that may impact people’s knowledge sharing practices. Our results show that the perceived controllability of using a knowledge management platform is not critical, confirming many previous findings that perceived ease or difficulty related to IT usage does not play a central role in successful knowledge management implementations. However, perceived selfefficacy, i.e. one’s conviction of his or her ability to conduct knowledge management tasks, is an important factor directly influencing knowledge sharing practice. In addition, one’s action/state orientation moderates his or her enactment of subjective norms and self-efficacy beliefs into intentions, and his/her enactment of controllability into behaviors. Overall, the result indicates that people of high self-efficacy and action orientation are more likely to overcome the impediment in knowledge sharing. But, more important, the low R square value of 0.04 indicates that the overall explanatory power of the quantitative study is rather low. This weak R square value may be caused by the limitation of the quantitative approach to study a fundamentally social act such as knowledge sharing. In this paper, we report the results of our follow-up qualitative study, in which more than 40 SCTNet members have been interviewed to further comprehend the intention-action