Knowledge Sharing From Employee's Perspective

Abstract

This chapter combines three less-studied factors on employee knowledge sharing, namely, social relationship, contextual performance, and IT competence. Using a survey study that was targeted to professional employees in a R&D department, we reveal that both social relationship—which incorporates degree of centrality of employee's social network and frequency of interpersonal interaction—and employee's contextual performance have significant positive impacts on knowledge sharing. This association, however, is found to be further positively moderated by employee's IT competence. Our work extends the literature pertaining to knowledge sharing by, not only providing an enhanced approach to measure social relationship, but also emphasizing that social relationship or contextual performance can magnify the impact on knowledge sharing through a high level of IT competence. The findings provide managerial and future research insights pertaining to promoting knowledge sharing by enhancing social relationship, rewarding contextual performance, and improving IT competence of employees.