Employees Trust Their Knowledge Integration Mechanism And Shared Willingness To Study

With the coming of knowledge-based economy, knowledge is playing a significant role in the organization. It is essential to make use of the knowledge owned by organizations and its capability for knowledge utilization and development. More and more organizations invest a large amount of human resources and materials for knowledge management. Knowledge sharing and integration are the most important elements during the process of knowledge management. Only through sharing can the knowledge at the individual level be integrated into the organizational level, and then become the core competence of the firm.The factors that can influence the knowledge sharing and integration among employees include the "hard" ones such as information management system and the "soft" ones such as employee trust. From the trust perspective, this paper proposed a series of research hypotheses and a theoretical model based on literature review. Following the way of "trust→organizational identification/organization-based self-esteem (OBSE)→willingness of knowledge integration and sharing", the research was conducted with organizational members through questionnaire and analysis methods such as CITC, a coefficient, correlation analysis, factor analysis, independent- sample T test, ANOVA and CEM to explore the mediating effects of organizational identification and OBSE and to test all the proposed research hypotheses and theoretical model. The purpose of this research is to explore the function mechanism of employees' trust on their willingness of knowledge integration and sharing. The research included five parts as follows:Study 1 is to explore the employees' trust construct in Chinese culture context. This study divided the employees' trust into trust in organization with one dimension, trust in supervisor and trust in co-workers with three dimensions of "moral-based trust", "capability-based trust" and "guanxi-based trust". Empirical study showed that these measure scales had good reliability and validity. This research found moral-based trust explained the most variance of trust in supervisor, then the capability-based trust and guanxi-based trust. As for trust in co-workers, moral-based trust also explained the most variance, then the guanxi-based trust and capability-based trust.Study 2 is to explore the mechanism of trust on willingness of knowledge integration and sharing. Most current literatures focus on the direct effects of trust on knowledge sharing. However, the research about trust and knowledge integration as well as other mediators between trust and knowledge integration and sharing remain untested. This study took organizational identification and OBSE as the mediators to explore the intrinsic mechanism of trust on willingness of knowledge integration and sharing. The results showed that organizational identification and OBSE were the full mediators between trust in organization and willingness of knowledge integration, organizational identification was the full mediator between trust in supervisor and willingness of knowledge integration, organizational identification and OBSE were the full mediators between trust in co-workers and willingness of knowledge integration. Besides, the results also showed that organizational identification and OBSE partially mediate the relationship between trust in organization and willingness of knowledge sharing, organizational identification was the full mediator between trust in supervisor and willingness of knowledge sharing, organizational identification and OBSE were the full mediators between trust in co-workers and willingness of knowledge sharing. So, employees' trust in organization, supervisors, and co-workers influenced their cognition as well as affection and also had a further effect on their willingness of knowledge integration and sharing. And the results also showed that not all the dimensions of trust, such as trust in supervisor had insignification impact on OBSE.Study 3 is to test the influential effect of organizational identification on OBSE. Previous research didn't have unified opinion the relationship between organizational identification and OBSE. Most recent research viewed organizational identification as the antecedent of OBSE and found that organizational identification might promote OBSE. This study validated this point of view and showed that in Chinese culture context, organizational identification has significant effect on OBSE (β=0.256, p<0.001) .It implied that organizational identification may promote the employees' cognition of themselves.Study 4 is to explore the influential effect of willingness of knowledge integration on willingness of knowledge sharing. Knowledge sharing is the premise of knowledge integration, and knowledge integration may benefit knowledge innovation, which do good to knowledge sharing. This study discussed the effect of willingness of knowledge integration on willingness of knowledge sharing, and the empirical research found that willingness of knowledge integration willingness had significant effect on willingness of knowledge sharing (β=0.432, p<0.001) .Study 5 is to explore the factors of individual level and organizational level that influence organizational identification, OBSE, willingness of knowledge integration and knowledge sharing. There are many factors that influence the willingness of employees' knowledge integration and sharing. In order to observe how trust affects the willingness of employee knowledge sharing and integration through organizational identification and OBSE, this research took individual variables such as age, educational background, working time, department, and organizational variables such as the firm property, sector and size etc., as control variables, and analyzed their influence on the mediator variables and the dependent variables. The results showed that, compared with other sectors, the employees of retail industry and IT industry had higher score on willingness of knowledge sharing. The male employees had higher score on OBSE and willingness of knowledge integration than female employees. Besides, the employees with college education background were much more interested in willingness of knowledge sharing and compared to other departments, the employees in financial department had lower scores on organizational identification and willingness of knowledge integration.The results of this study enriched the theory of trust, organizational identification, OBSE, knowledge sharing and integration. Finally, the theoretical progresses and practical implications were discussed, as well as the limitations of this study and the directions for future research.