Influence of social relations on knowledge conflicts–an empirical study from Chinese universities

Abstract

This paper aims to systematically investigate the impact of different types of social relationships on knowledge conflicts during the process of knowledge sharing based on the theory of relation model. This empirical study collected 288 surveys from research team members in fourteen universities in China. The results show that public sharing and academic power have positive effects on cognitive knowledge conflicts and negative effects on emotional knowledge conflicts; expected association has more significant effects on knowledge conflicts than expected reward; sharing cost has positive effects on knowledge conflict, knowledge sharing willingness plays a mediating role between social relations and knowledge conflicts. At last, the paper presents management suggestions from perspectives of team trust, power allocation and incentive methods.