Is Trust the Most Important Human Factor Influencing Knowledge Sharing in Organisations?

The present study explores several of the most significant social and cognitive human factors that have been found to motivate or inhibit organisational knowledge sharing in previous empirical studies. Of specific interest is the individual and collective effect that trust, shared language, shared vision, tie strength, homophily and relationship length have on three important conditions necessary for effective knowledge sharing to take place (i.e. willingness to share, willingness to use and perceived receipt of useful knowledge). The study also considers the nature of the employee working relationship (positive versus negative) and the form of knowledge sharing (explicit versus tacit). In total, 275 surveys were completed by employees working on projects at one of Canada's largest multijurisdictional law firms. Quantitative methods were used to examine the relationships between the dependent variables and independent variables, while controlling for all the other variables in the model.

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