Exploring The Impacts Of Reciprocal Trust On Knowledge Transfer Within An Organization

Many studies have shown that the effective transfer of knowledge within an organization is the key factor to ensure the organization's sustainable competitive advantage.In order to prevent the loss of organizational knowledge,managers should constantly encourage employees to share their treasured knowledge with each other.However due to the asymmetric nature of information when transferring the knowledge,there is a tendency for the moral hazard of information hiding to emerge,which tends to benefit the knowledge-seeker unilaterally and may be costly to the knowledge-provider.From the perspective of economic exchange theory,rational knowledge-providers that holding valuable knowledge will refuse to transfer their knowledge unless the benefits generated outweigh the costs.Therefore,the study on knowledge transfer has moved progressively toward the internal mechanisms of knowledge transfer in recent years.Through the application of Knowledge-based view,knowledge transfer theory and social exchange theory of theoretical analysis,it can be concluded that individuals' primary motivation to transfer their treasured knowledge can be summarized as"Reciprocal trust",that is,the individuals trust their selfless transfer behavior can be reciprocated by the knowledge-seekers in the future.In this study,simulation models based on knowledge transfer behavior and reciprocal trust between individuals are built through the Agent-based modeling and simulation to investigate the factors that influence the efficiency of knowledge transfer within an organization.Experiments are performed to test the impact of reciprocal trust and organizational structure on the efficiency of knowledge transfer,and mainly to solve the following two deficiencies of existing researches:1.Previous studies have mostly used the concept of debt-servicing in explaining reciprocal behaviour within an organization,but this emphasis on offsetting(repayment)has led to the fact that the literature on reciprocity has focused on the net-benefits(benefits and costs)of knowledge-seekers and knowledge-providers,ignoring the norm of reciprocity in organizational behaviour and that the subsequent studies have seldom onsidered the net-benefit concept alongside reciprocity.2.Although the significant and positive role of trust on knowledge transfer has been clearly indicated in the field of knowledge management,existing relevant studies have not provided enough evidence for whether trust should be regarded by organizational leaders as a core factor impacting the efficiency of knowledge transfer within organizations.3.Prior studies still mainly analyze trust and knowledge transfer separately so far,but do not study trust and knowledge transfer together.Through the exploration of relevant literature,the core research about knowledge in this paper is divided into explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge according to its own attributes.The simulation models based on knowledge transfer behavior and reciprocal trust between individuals are built through the Agent-based modeling and simulation approach to investigate the factors that influence the efficiency of knowledge transfer within an organization.Experiments are performed to test the impact of reciprocal trust and organizational structure on the efficiency of knowledge transfer.Through the above research,the following conclusions are found:1.Among the parameters related to trust,a high level of initial trust within an organization can greatly increase the opportunities for members to share their knowledge,and members should pay less attention to the behaviors of other members.2.Members of the organization should be more tolerant of other members.Especially within the organizations with low trust atmosphere,individuals' inherent tolerance for partners should be relatively high.3.Members and leaders of an organization should pay special attention to the endowment effect.The greater the endowment effect,the greater the opportunity for effective transfer of tacit knowledge among members.4.In terms of honesty,the leader of the organization shall ensure In terms of honesty,the leader of the organization shall ensure effective restraint on the level of honesty of the members of the organization,especially the behavior of the lowest level of honesty(that is,the behavior of the members with the lowest level of honesty within an organizaiton).5.Managers should maintain the size of the organization within a scientific and reasonable range to some extent,and focus on the improvement of the organizational trust climate to assure the effective transfer of knowledge within organization,rather than introducing knowledgeable experts.Finally,the main innovations of this paper are as follows:1.The Agent-based modeling and simulation(ABMS)approch is adopted in this paper to model and simulate the related factors and interaction rules of reciprocal trust impacting the efficiency of knowledge transfer within organizations,and the ambiguous relationship between the trust and knowledge transfer is studied together.In the end,the whole process of the validation and the verification of the models adopted of this paper is demonstrated.2.In order to make up for the lack of research on reciprocity by focusing too much on net benefit,this study combines reciprocity criterion and interpersonal trust into mutual trust to realize the purpose of combining reciprocity and net benefit.3.The results of the simulation experiment provide a more complete and detailed insight into the relationship between reciprocal trust and knowledge transfer.In addition to testing the parameters related to reciprocal trust,the simulation experiment on the impact of organizational structure on the efficiency of knowledge transfer within an organization is also conducted.4.The rationality(utility)of knowledge seekers and that of knowledge providers receives equal attention in the explicit knowledge simulation model.5.In the simulation experiment on the impact of reciprocal trust on the efficiency of tacit knowledge transfer,this study modeled honesty as a threshold of individuals' resistance to the temptation and endowed it to the Agents.Through the simulation experiment,the influence of the efficiency of tacit knowledge transfer in honest organizations and among members was objectively and meticulously studied.