Show me the money …or not? The detrimental effect of rewards on knowledge sharing

Firms’ ability to generate innovation increasingly relies on individuals’ knowledge and competences, in such a way that the most successful companies are those that value and exploit people’s human capital. Following this, many firms have revised their internal organization by adopting ‘new organizational forms’ characterized by highly dynamic shapes and structures and likely to support the development and generation of knowledge assets (Cunha & Kamoche, 2001). Consistent with these changes in organizational forms has been changes in the nature of jobs, which have become more knowledge-intensive, thus requiring employees to acquire, generate, manage new knowledge. Given that successful knowledge management strategies tend to originate from effective intra-organizational knowledge sharing behaviors, organizations should be concerned with how to manage employees’ motivations affecting such behaviours. More precisely, they should be aware of the dynamic relationship that links intrinsic (e.g. enjoyment) and extrinsic motivation (e.g. monetary incentives) (Osterloh et al., 2001), i.e. their crowding effect.