Wednesday, September 9, 2020 | 4:00pm-5:30pm | ZOOM

Abstract

Organizations are increasingly introducing online platforms to facilitate knowledge sharing within the organization. Nevertheless, not all employees actively participate in knowledge sharing on these online platforms. This study aims to identify situational and dispositional determinants that jointly predict employees’ knowledge sharing behavior on online platforms. To guide our investigation, we draw on social exchange theory, and the idea of generalized exchange, which research has found plays a pivotal role in facilitating interactions on online platforms. Under a social exchange framework, employees’ knowledge-sharing behaviors are determined by the exchange partners (i.e., the requestor), the focal employee (i.e., the actor) and the work situation (i.e., the exchange context). Following this, we propose that an employee is likely to share her/his knowledge on online platforms when 1) the request is from those who previously worked in the same office (i.e., past collocation history), 2) the employee is in favor of generalized exchange (generalized exchange orientation), and 3) the employee needs to use a wide variety of knowledge to complete their jobs (i.e., knowledge variety). Using a longitudinal dataset spanning six months among 100 users on an in-house online platform of a professional service firm, we find support for the three-way interaction hypothesis. This study identifies who is likely to engage in knowledge sharing on online platforms and when s/he is likely to do so. We discuss implications on knowledge sharing on in-house online platforms.