| With entering into the knowledge-based economy, "knowledge" has become the most important strategic resource of organizations. Competition among organizations is increasingly based knowledge. It is essential for an organization to make use of the knowledge it already owns and its capability for knowledge utilization and development. If the knowledge at the individual level is not shared by others, its utilities are limited to only one person. Knowledge sharing is a prerequisite of knowledge creation and re-use in the organization. Therefore, knowledge sharing and integration (KSI) are the most important elements of knowledge management. However, they are also difficult aspects in knowledge management. In a day with rapid progress of information technology, success of KSI does not rely on technology but on "people". In traditional Chinese culture, "loyalty" is one of the fundamental principles people should follow in interpersonal relations. However, in today's economic-centric culture context, the employee turnover rate is higher and it is common for an employee to change his/her profession. The employees' loyalty to organization and profession is becoming a serious issue to the success of the organization. Therefore, correctly identifying the factors impacting employee loyalty, discovering the operation mechanisms among employee loyalty to different objects, and understanding the relationship between employee loyalty and KSI will not only help an organization create loyal employees but also achieve sustainable knowledge innovation and maintain its competion advantage.After reviewed related literature about employee loyalty and KSI from both domestic and foreign, this paper conducted a series of theoretical exploration and empirical study along the way of "loyalty antecedents (work and environmental characteristic factors)→auditors' loyalty→KSI" based on the survey of auditors in accounting firms, from the perspective of an organization.(1) The construct and antecedents of auditors' loyalty were analyzed. Based on the current economic environment and the cultural background of China, this study explored the construct and antecedents of auditors' organizational loyalty, supervisory loyalty, co-worker loyalty and professional loyalty. Through the confirmatory factors analysis, the applicability of Meyer & Allen's three-factor model of employee loyalty in China was verified. This research found that, in the context of current economic and culture development in China, the affective loyalty explained the most variance of auditors loyalty to organization/supervisor/profession, then the normative loyalty and continuance loyalty; and for co-worker loyalty, the normative loyalty explained the most variance, then the affective loyalty and continuance loyalty; further more, this research showed the variance explained by the affective loyalty and the normative loyalty was obviously greater than that by the continuance loyalty in auditors loyalty to organization/ supervisor/co-worker/profession. At the same time, seven key factors' impact on auditors' loyalty had been certified also. Four of them were organizational Support, Role Stress, Career Development and Employee Involvement, which had a direct impact on auditors loyalty to organization/supervisor/co-worker, and had an indirectly impact on auditors loyalty to organization/supervisor/co-worker as well through professional loyalty. The other three key factors were Leadership Behavior, Professional Reputation and Task Interdependence. Leadership Behavior had an indirect effect on the auditors' loyalty to an organization/supervisor/co-worker through the professional loyalty besides its direct effect on supervisory loyalty. Professional Reputation has an indirect impact on the auditors' loyalty to organization/supervisor/co-worker just through the professional loyalty. On the other hand, Task Interdependence had a direct impact on auditors' loyalty to organization and co-workers only.(2) The operation mechanisms among professional loyalty, organizational loyalty, supervisory loyalty and co-worker loyalty of auditors were explored. The object of employee loyalty can be any one entity. Therefore, an intuitive question is wheather there are any links among employee loyalty to the different objects? The empirical research of this dissertation revealed that auditor's professional loyalty had a significant positive effect on their organizational/supervisory/co-worker loyalty. This result showed that auditors' loyalty to profession could enhance auditors' identification and involvement to organization/supervisor/co-worker, and accelerate the formation and improvement of auditors' organizational/supervisory/co-worker loyalty.(3) The construct and interaction of KSI were explored. KSI is harder to be test for its scenario-dependence. Our initial study found that most of existing researches were done in Western culture context. Chinese and Western culture had a significant difference. The way of thinking and acting between Chinese and Western was distinctly different as well. This research divided knowledge sharing into two dimensions of "knowledge constituted ability noumenal sharing" and "knowledge constituted ability using sharing", and divided knowledge integration into two dimensions of "knowledge integration motivation" and "knowledge integration capability" from individual level. Empirical study showed that these measurement scales had good reliability and validity. The tendency of auditors knowledge sharing had a significantly positive impact on the tendency of auditors knowledge integration.(4) The operation mechanisms between auditors' loyalty and KIS were explored. KIS is a social process, and in this social process, "people" is essential. Many scholars had studied the issues of knowledge sharing and knowledge integration from the "people" perspective. There was no comprehensive study on knowledge sharing and knowledge integration from employee loyalty perspective. This research put auditors' organizational/supervisory/co-worker/professional loyalty into knowledge sharing and knowledge integration research model at the same time. Empirical study found that: all of auditors loyalty to organization/supervisor/co-worker/profession had a significantly positive impact on auditors' KSI. Among them, for knowledge sharing, the effect of auditors' professional loyalty was the highest, followed by auditors' supervisory/co-worker/organization loyalty; for knowledge integration, the effect of auditors' organization loyalty was the highest, followed by auditors' professional/supervisory/co-worker loyalty. Moreover, the effect of auditors' organizational/supervisory/co-worker/professional loyalty on knowledge integration was larger than their impact on knowledge sharing.(5) The mediate impact of auditors' loyalty in the work and environmental factors affected KIS was explored. At present, the study about the factor of work or environment affected KIS were all from the perspective of direct effect, and the intermediary effect of employee psychological factors (such as employee loyalty) was almost not considered. This study used the structural equation modeling to explore and test the intermediary role of auditors loyalty in work and environmental factors affected KIS by Baron & Kenny (1986)'s four confirmed conditions of mediation. The results revealed that auditors loyalty had a significant mediate effect between the work and environmental characteristics factors and KIS. Based on this, this research imported the operational relationship among auditors loyalty in the study model and determined the best fit model among the work and environmental characteristics factors, auditors loyalty, and KIS using structural equation modeling technology and model competing methods. The author found that most of the work and environmental factors affected KIS through the full mediation of auditors loyalty, while a few factors also had a direct impact on KIS. In particular, all of Organizational Support, Leadership Behavior, Role Stress, Career Development, Task Interdependence, Employee Involvement and Professional Reputation had significant positive effect on KIS through the full mediate impact of auditors loyalty. In addition, Role Stress and Task Interdependence had a direct effect on knowledge sharing, while Leadership Behavior and Career Development had a direct effect on knowledge integration as well. These results showed that the work and environmental factors affected KIS mainly via changing auditors loyalty.(6) The effect of the individual characteristics on auditors' loyalty and KIS was analyzed. There are many factors that influence employee loyalty and KIS. In order to observe the operation mechanisms among the work and environmental factors, auditors loyalty and KIS, this research took individual variables such as gender, age, marital status, education, salary, organizational tenure, position, professional tenure and the title of technical post etc., as control variables, and analyzed their influence on auditors loyalty and KIS. The results showed that, married auditors had higher scores on professional loyalty than unmarried auditors. Auditors of age between 30-35 years had lower scores on organizational loyalty than auditors of age over 40 years, while auditors of age between 25-29 years had lower scores on professional loyalty than auditors of age over 36 years. Auditors of organizational (or professional) tenure over 7 years had higher scores on organizational loyalty than auditors of organizational (or professional) tenure below 7 years, and auditors of organizational (or professional) tenure over 5 years had higher scores on professional loyalty than auditors of organizational (or professional) tenure below 5 years. The higher the position of auditors was, the higher his (or her) organizational loyalty was, and the stronger the tendency of his (her) knowledge integration was. The higher the title level of auditors was, the higher his (or her) organizational loyalty and professional loyalty was.The results of this study enriched the theory of employee loyalty, knowledge sharing and integration, and had some enlightenment for accounting firms' management practices of employee loyalty, knowledge sharing and integration.
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