Who trusts? personality, trust and knowledge sharing (Mooradian et al, 2006, ML)

Introduction

1.  Enabling knowledge creation and knowledge sharing is essential to innovation and organizational success. Nevertheless, knowledge sharing can be a demanding and uncertain process.

2.  understanding the various factors that facilitate or hinder knowledge sharing, including the individual level aspects of knowledge sharing, is important to both managers and academics.

Knowledge Sharing

3. Knowledge sharing is defined as ‘the provision or receipt of task information, know-how and feedback regarding a product or procedure’ (Cummings, 2004: 352) and has been tied to a variety of managerial desirable outcomes including productivity, task completion time, organizational learning and innovativeness

4. Various kinds of factors may influence knowledge sharing, including:

 (1) the properties of the knowledge itself,

 (2) the properties of management and managerial actions,

 (3) the properties of the environment, including macro-level environmental factors 

 (4) the properties of the individuals who share (or fail to share) knowledge, 

Interpersonal Trust

5. One individual level factor which ameliorates knowledge sharing is interpersonal trust in the workplace.

6. interpersonal trust, ‘the willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectation that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective of the ability to monitor or control that other party’ (Mayer et al., 1995: 712), is an attitude-like construct – an expectation related to past experience and focused on specific others such as managers or peers.

7. Interpersonal trust in the workplace has been shown to have a strong and robust influence on a variety of organizational phenomena including job satisfaction, stress, organizational commitment, productivity and most relevant to the current research, knowledge sharing

8.Trust leads to increased overall knowledge exchange, makes knowledge exchanges less costly and increases the likelihood that knowledge acquired from a colleague is sufficiently understood and absorbed that a person can put it to use. (Abrams et al. 2003: 65; see Levin and Cross, 2004)

9.Most of that research, like much of the research on the antecedents of knowledge sharing, has focused on environmental or contextual influences on interpersonal trust in the workplace: ‘While acknowledging their existence, organizational theorists generally have not evinced much interest in such individual differences’ (Kramer, 1999: 575).
 
10. Propensity to trust, or trait trust, ‘is essentially a tendency to make attributions of people’s actions in either an optimistic or pessimistic fashion’ (DeNeve and Cooper, 1998: 220). ‘A person with high trust assumes that most people are fair, honest and have good intentions. Persons low in trust see others as selfish, devious and potentially dangerous’ 

11.