An Empirical Study on Factors Influencing Knowledge Sharing among Groups

집단간 지식공유의 영향요인에 관한 연구

Knowledge sharing, as well as knowledge creation, is the basis for an organization to maintain its competitive advantage. Organizations trying to use knowledge resources for strategic purposes or pursuing knowledge management are now paying more attention to methods to facilitate knowledge sharing. This study aims to find out the answers to the questions below. (1) Which relational or structural factors influence the intentions to share knowledge among groups? (2) Does the intension to share knowledge among groups really influence the knowledge sharing behavior? (3) What are the roles of accessibility on the relationship between intention to share knowledge and behavior of knowledge sharing? (4) Does the behavior of knowledge sharing really improve the effectiveness of knowledge sharing among groups? Findings of this study are summarized as follows. First, the positive relations of the relational and structural factors with the intention to share knowledge among groups are found. However, crisis intensity was found to have no meaningful influence on the intention to share knowledge among groups. After all we could see through additional analysis that it is in curvilinear relation, not linear relation. Second, we examined relation of the intention to share knowledge with the behavior of knowledge sharing among groups. Multiple regression analysis showed that intention to share knowledge among groups had a statistically significant influence on the behavior of knowledge sharing among groups. Third, the moderating effect of accessibility on the relation between the intention to share knowledge and the behavior of knowledge sharing was found to be statistically significant. Fourth, the relation between behavior of knowledge sharing and the effectiveness among groups was found to be statistically significant, but in a negative direction. The findings imply that the quantity of knowledge sharing does not always lead to the effectiveness of knowledge sharing.