To share or not to share: How knowledge collecting fosters organizational creativity

Over the past two decades, several changes occurred within the labor market and the competitive environment. There appeared to emerge a new way of thinking about generating innovations: firms’ sustainable competitiveness increasingly relies on individuals’ knowledge and competences, rather than on tangible or purely financial resources; employees’ work mobility has amplified; the most strategic innovations are those exploiting individuals’ human capital (Belenzon and Schankerman 2015; Bornay‐Barrachina et al. 2012; Han et al. 2014; Kato et al. 2015; McGuirk et al. 2015). As a response to this evolution in the model of innovating, most organizations have implemented new ways of governing the internal relations, by adopting organizational forms likely to foster the development and generation of knowledge assets (Cunha and Kamoche 2001; Daft and Lewin 1993). Based on this premise and building on prior literature (e.g. Osterloh et al. 2002), we aim to place emphasis on the need for any organization to build a horizontal structure to foster knowledge sharing activities, while devoting attention to the management of individual motivation. Accordingly, our purpose is to address the following two research questions: 1) “How does individual-level motivation - in the form of crowding effects - influence intra-organizational knowledge sharing behaviours?”; and 2) “What is the impact of extrinsic rewards on employees’ knowledge sharing behaviours when horizontal integrative mechanisms are in place?”.