Research On The Incentive Mechanism For Knowledge Sharing Within Enterprise’s R&D Team

With the rapid development of economy and the increasingly fierce marketcompetition, innovation has become the foundation of enterprise’s existence anddevelopment. Enterprise’s R&D team is the main force of technological breakthroughand new product development, which plays an important role in the upgrade oftechnology and product. So how to build a high performance R&D team has become aheat problem of academic group and concerned practice branch. Compatible with thedevelopment of the knowledge economy, enterprise’s R&D team is a typical knowledgeintensive team, which has apparent knowledge characteristics that team membersgenerally are knowledge workers with high knowledge level and the R&D task is thegenerate of new knowledge. As sharing efficiency of members’ R&D skills andspecialized knowledge decides the speed and quality of R&D in a great extent,promoting knowledge sharing within enterprise’s R&D team is an important way toimprove the performance of enterprise innovation. However, owing to lack ofmotivations and incentives, members usually are unwilling to sharing their privateknowledge with others spontaneously. In order to induce and encourage effectiveknowledge sharing, complete compensation incentive mechanism in combining withR&D team’s characters and requirements should be established by enterprise.After introducing the theory of team, R&D team, knowledge, knowledge sharing,some domestic and foreign classic papers about knowledge sharing within enterprise’sR&D team, incentive for knowledge sharing within team based on principal-agenttheory, peer pressure and loss aversion were described and some conclusions are drawnto lay the foundation for this paper, the research ideas and the framework of this paperwas established.The paper is focused on enterprise’s R&D team, and traditional hypothesis ofrational one is relaxed to social one. Considering the effects of irrational psychologicalfactors on knowledge sharing behaviors, the principal-agent theory is applied toestablish incentive models for knowledge sharing within enterprise’s R&D team incondition of peer pressure and loss aversion separately. It is compared with traditionalincentive mechanism for knowledge sharing within team that the concrete roles thatpeer pressure and loss aversion play in knowledge sharing are analyzed by the methodof theoretical analyses and simulation, and the effects of peer pressure sensitivecoefficient, loss aversion coefficient, target performance and knowledge sharing importance coefficient on the two parties’ optimal decisions and the enterprise’sexpected utility are analyzed. The two kinds of incentive mechanism proposed by thispaper separately apply to different R&D teams and knowledge managementcircumstances, which can be made use of by enterprise selectively. The incentivemechanism based on peer pressure apply to special team under coding knowledgemanagement strategy, and the incentive mechanism based on loss aversion apply tointerdepartmental team under personalized knowledge management strategy. For thesake of improving the efficient use of knowledge and the ability to innovation, therelative incentive mechanisms should be completed by enterprise according to the actualconditions by making full use of members’ irrational psychological features.