A Motivation Crowding Effect on Knowledge Sharing within Organizational Flexible Structures

The evolution, which has been characterizing the competitive market since some decades, has lead companies to reexamine and rebuild their organizational forms. Huge changes have been especially produced by the increasing awareness that the most strategic sources of competitive advantage are incorporated in the intangible assets, particularly in the knowledge resources. Given this, companies have tried to react by adopting more flexible structures (i.e. new organizational forms), likely to support knowledge generation and sharing opportunities. Nevertheless, as knowledge assets reside in individuals’ mind, they can be shared and valued only if the individual is motivated to do it. Based on this, this paper integrates the literature on new organizational forms and on individuals’ motivation with the purpose of explaining how such views may affect employees’ intra-organizational knowledge sharing behaviors. More specifically, we aim at investigating to what extent the dynamic relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (i.e. motivation crowding effect) influences their knowledge sharing behaviors as well as whether extrinsic motivation (i.e. extrinsic rewards) affects the role played by integrative mechanisms on knowledge sharing behaviors.