Claire Gubbins
Dublin City University
Claire is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour & HRM at DCU, Executive MBA Programme Director, Associate Editor for Human Resource Development Quarterly, Fulbright Scholar of Carnegie Mellon University. She publishes in Organization Studies, Human Resource Management (US), Journal of Management Inquiry, Advances in Developing Human Resources, Human Resource Development Review.
The knowledge possessed by individuals is a key source of competitive advantage (Grant, 1996) but tacit knowledge is especially valuable as it is rare, difficult to substitute, imitate and transfer (Grant, 1996; Nonaka, 1991). Sharing tacit knowledge is a complex endeavour due to its less articulable nature (Kogut and Zander, 1992). As it is possessed by individuals (Grant, 1996), individuals need to be motivated to share it (Hansen, Mors, and Løvås, 2005; Szulanski, 1996) and seekers need to be motivated to seek knowledge they need and learn from it (Hurley, 2002). Thus, there is a need to explore the processes that enable tacit knowledge sharing (Gherardi & Nicolini, 2002: Swan et al., 2002: Perez-Lopez, Montes-Peon & Vazquez-Ordas, 2006).
The knowledge sharing literature tends to focus only on the uni-directional exchange of knowledge from the knowledge provider to the knowledge seeker (Hansen, Mors, and Løvås, 2005; Kim, Song, and Jones, 2011) i.e. the “provider” or “push” perspective (Kim et al., 2011; Lin, Geng, and Whinston, 2005; McElroy, 2003). This perspective focuses on increasing exposure to knowledge and expecting that learning will take place. However, learning research identifies that knowledge is only learned from others when people have the need, motivation or opportunity for learning (Marsick and Watkins 2001). Hence, there are calls for research on the knowledge seeking or “pull” perspective (Kim et al., 2011; Lai and Graham, 2009).
Despite a significant amount of research on motivation and knowledge sharing, there are limitations. The time and effort required to share tacit knowledge is more extensive. The value of tacit knowledge is greater, requiring higher levels of motivation to share this value. Second, the research fails to consider how motivational factors may have a differential role and influence on the tacit knowledge provider as opposed to the tacit knowledge seeker (Levin & Cross, 2004).
To capture motivational factors, we adopt the lens of the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) (Gagne, 2009) .
The data was from 1,279 employees within 8 organisations. We tested one research model to predict tacit knowledge seeking behaviour and one to predict tacit knowledge sharing behaviour. The TPB model of knowledge seeking demonstrated a good fit to the data. The TPB model of knowledge sharing demonstrated an inferior fit to the data, suggesting that this was not a good explanation as to why individuals share knowledge. Examining the regression weights, attitude towards sharing was a significantly stronger predictor of intention to share and actual sharing behaviour than it was for seeking intentions and behaviours. Subjective norms and self-efficacy played a stronger role in predicting seeking intentions and behaviours than they did in predicting intentions to share and actual sharing behaviours.
The results illustrate that the processes of tacit knowledge seeking and sharing are distinct processes. They also illustrate that the processes of tacit knowledge seeking and sharing are grounded in fundamentally different theories of motivation. The behaviours driving tacit knowledge sharing are not grounded in TPB. The behaviours driving tacit knowledge seeking are explained using TPB.
IAM_2017_TPB_Tacit_Knowledge_Share_Seek_submission_Gubbins_Freeney.pdf 