Investigating Inter-Organizational Knowledge Sharing Intention in Supply Chain Partnership

In today’s knowledge based economies, organizations cannot rely on acquiring the required knowledge solely from internal resources. This will make inter-organizational knowledge sharing an important issue. A great proportion of the current Studies mostly focus on the intention to share knowledge within an organization. This paper argues that there is a need to investigate the intention to share knowledge between organizations especially among supply chain partners because inter-organizational knowledge sharing is critical to supply chain activities. Based on the literature, the current study proposes a conceptual model showing the factors affecting inter-organizational knowledge sharing in supply chains, and how these factors may affect intention to share knowledge among the chained organisations. Through a systematic literature review, three major sets of factors were identified including: contextual factors, organizational factors and factors related to nature of knowledge. It is illustrated in the proposed conceptual model that contextual factors influence the intention to share knowledge in IO contexts. A plan is also proposed for both validation and testing of the conceptual model. For this purpose a mix methodology approach is proposed including interviews and a survey.