Improving knowledge sharing behaviors: the contribution of cultural and job design factors within manufacturing companies

Knowledge management scholars have long been concerned about the way managers may lead organizational members to voluntarily share what they know within the company, thus underlining that the success of knowledge management activities is strongly linked to how intra-organizational knowledge sharing is implemented. The relevance of knowledge sharing process is justified by the fact that sharing knowledge and information allows employees to talk and listen to each other, to stimulate new knowledge creation and to fasten mutual learning. Knowledge sharing is thus the first step organizations should take to value and exploit their knowledge. Studying knowledge sharing processes within firms becomes particularly relevant when the focus is on knowledge-intensive organizations where strategic knowledge is usually dispersed across highly skilled workers operating in different units, departments, or divisions and whose value needs to be exploited as much as possible in order to support the ability of the firm to remain competitive in its market. Despite the difficulty of transferring and exchanging knowledge, which strongly depends on individuals’ willingness and desire to do so, the literature stresses the importance of acting upon organizational-level tools to improve employees’ engagement in knowledge sharing. In this regard, prior contributions suggest to appropriately tap into both ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ aspects, whose combination is found to be particularly crucial for an effective knowledge sharing activity. Based on this premise, this paper attempts to expand existing research on knowledge sharing organizational enablers by aiming at answering the following research question: “what is the role played by organizational factors in shaping employees’ knowledge sharing behaviors?”