2007/11/02: The road to knowledge sharing is paved with good intentions

The article is about a model of motivational forces acting on an individual in relation to knowledge sharing, specifically in relation to the socialization and externalization parts of Nonaka and Konno's SECI model [1]. They gathered information via questionnaire, eventually collecting 154 responses from 27 companies in South Korea. They confirmed some unsurprising hypotheses, such as "people who think well of sharing knowledge profess a greater intention to do so" and "group cultures which value sharing knowledge influence people to profess a greater intention to do so also" [p. 100] They also found some things that surprised me, such as "individuals who feel that their self-worth is increased through knowledge sharing may not have a good attitute towards doing so" [p. 100].

I wonder how these different hypotheses interact -- the model proposed in the paper doesn't account for interactions between motivational factors. For instance, both organizational fairness and sense of self-worth are first order factors in the proposed research model [p. 92]. If an organization is not fair, this may also affect the sense of self worth factor as an individual may decline to share knowledge out of spite for the organization, even if they would feel better about themselves if they did. Similarly, the second order factors attitude towards knowledge sharing and subjective norm should be bi-directionally related: if individuals in a group have a poor attitude towards knowledge sharing, the subjective norm of the organization is likely to suffer.

1. Nonaka, I; Konno, N; "The Concept of "Ba": Building a Foundation for Knowledge Creation", California Management Review, Vol. 40, No. 3 (1998) pp. 40-54.