The Relationships between Barriers to Knowledge Flow and Knowledge Sharing

Abstract

Knowledge is widely seen as an important resource that can enable organizations to gain and maintain competitive advantages and thus the creation and circulation of knowledge is one of the main focuses of strategic management However barriers to knowledge flows can obviously have negative impacts on knowledge sharing and in this study we use the Elaboration-Likelihood Model (ELM) to examine the influences that these have on knowledge sharing intention More specifically this work investigates how knowledge sharing intention are affected by knowledge characteristics barriers knowledge source barriers and knowledge receiver barriers among employees It also examines how these processes are moderated by barriers related to contextual factors and mechanisms This study’s sample is drawn from the top 1 000 manufacturing and top 500 services companies in Taiwan After sending questionnaires to relevant personal at these firms the final sample consisted of 203 usable responses and the results showed that knowledge characteristics barriers knowledge source barriers and knowledge receiver barriers have a significant negative effects on knowledge sharing intention and barriers related to contextual factors and mechanisms have a significant negative moderating effects on the associations between these three kinds of barriers and knowledge sharing intention

Date of Award	2014 Aug 7
Original language	English
Supervisor	Chinho Lin (Supervisor)