Organizational antecedents shaping knowledge sharing behviors. Empirical evidence from innovative manufactoring sectors

How can firms act upon organizational tools when trying to foster employees’ knowledge sharing (KS) orientations? Given the lack of a clear understanding about how organizational factors affect KS processes, this paper aims at addressing this issue by starting from the criticality of knowledge assets especially for firms operating in dynamic markets. It has been shown that in order to be more valuable and be a source of competitive advantage, knowledge needs to be shared, as sharing ideas leads to new ideas creation and interpretation. Despite knowledge is hard to transfer and employees may be reluctant in sharing what they know, firms should know that managers can affect workers’ behaviors by dealing with organizational factors. In order to address this issue, we analyze web‐survey data of 758 knowledge workers from 24 international innovative manufacturing firms. By using Ordinary Least Square regression, we empirically test the relationship between hard and soft organizational KS antecedents and employees’ voluntary behavior in sharing knowledge (i.e. knowledge donating).