The Effects Of Individual Motivations And Social Capital On Different Types Of Knowledge Sharing Intentions

Under the background of knowledge economy, knowledge has become a critical factor to a firm’s success. Many enterprises, especially the Internet and High-tech companies take knowledge as the core competitiveness. However, most of organization’s knowledge leech on to individuals, how to enhance employee knowledge sharing has become the focus of knowledge management studies. This study develops an integrated model to understand key factors of employee knowledge sharing intentions through constructs prescribed by two established knowledge management research streams, namely, those concerning individual motivations and social capital.Many researchers have studied individual motivations and social capital on employees’knowledge sharing intentions. Previous studies, however, seem to be limited in that they did not address the type of knowledge to be shared. From the point of view of economics, explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge has significantly different value. According to the research of the predecessors, tacit knowledge is more value than explicit knowledge since sharing it costs significantly more time and effort. As the TRA theory shows, when individuals share knowledge, they would consider the cost and benefit and make the a rational choice to get more. people are likely to adjust their knowledge sharing intentions according to the different resource requirements of tacit and explicit knowledge sharing activities. That’s why we distinguish between explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge.This article studies the effects of individual motivations and social capital on explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge sharing intention. Within the individual category, we follow Maslow’s research and choose organizational rewards, reciprocity, self-efficacy and enjoyment as the as salient motivation. Regarding the social category, since knowledge sharing consists of social interactions between employees and such interactions are influenced by the relationships between individuals. Social capital consists of structural, cognitive, and relational dimensions. We take the advice that posits social ties, shared goals, and social trust as the major constructs representing the structural, cognitive, and relational dimensions of social capital, respectively. What’s more, we adopts social capital as a second-order-formative variable comprising social ties, shared goals, and social trust.Around the explicit and tacit knowledge sharing intention, the four dimensions of individual motivation and social capital from three aspects, we put forward six categories, a total of 16 hypothesis in this paper. Research methods include questionnaire survey and small sample analysis. We use SPSS20.0 and PLS-Graph 3.0 to test hypotheses by EFA, CFA, reliability analysis, validity analysis and partial least squares regression.13 hypotheses are supported,3 hypotheses are not supported. Some interesting findings are that organizational rewards have a significant negative effect on tacit knowledge intentions, whereas they have a significant positive effect on explicit knowledge sharing intentions. Furthermore, organizational rewards have a large negative impact on tacit knowledge sharing intentions (β=-0.062), compared to their small positive impact on explicit knowledge sharing intentions (β=0.035). In addition, reciprocity has a more positive effect on explicit knowledge sharing intention(β=0.245) than on tacit knowledge(P=0.163). The results show that company offer more rewards to arise employee’s knowledge sharing intention may not work...