The Effects of Knowledge Sharing on Helping Behavior: Implications for Reward System Design

Abstract

We examine how individuals’ willingness to help others depends on whether or not this help involves knowledge sharing. We do so across environments that vary whether or not those providing help can receive rewards from the recipients of this help. In our experiment, employee-participants learn how to perform a task and decide how much help to provide employer-participants, where joint payoffs but also employees’ personal costs increase in the help provided. We manipulate whether or not employees’ help involves the sharing of task-relevant knowledge, holding the economic cost and benefit of help constant. Results suggest that knowledge sharing’s effect on helping behavior hinges on whether or not employees can expect rewards from employers for their help. Knowledge sharing decreases help in an environment where employees cannot receive rewards from employers, but increases help motivated by anticipated rewards. Our results are consistent with theory suggesting that individuals perceive their knowledge as an important part of their identity, making it costly to freely share but facilitating greater trust that recipients of this knowledge will reciprocate with future rewards. Moreover, our findings challenge the practice in accounting and economics of generalizing results from research studying helping behavior without knowledge sharing to knowledge-sharing domains. In doing so, this paper contributes to a better understanding of reward systems designed to promote knowledge sharing in practice.