A relational study of the knowledge sharing behavior and organizational commitment of engineers

The constructs of knowledge sharing and individual organizational commitment have been studied in the literature and are well-known in the workforce. Knowledge sharing behaviors such as knowledge donating and knowledge collecting are viewed as valuable behaviors by engineering managers since organizational knowledge can be viewed as intellectual capital. Technical organizations, in particular, need this intellectual capital to preserve their core competencies and to help differentiate themselves from their competition.;Organizations are constantly looking for ways to encourage their employees to share knowledge within the organization. Aside from the implementation of costly information and knowledge sharing systems, managers have few ways to encourage their employees to share their knowledge, especially if their organizations do not have a culture that rewards knowledge sharing. If a relationship could be found between knowledge sharing behaviors and another construct, perhaps within the culture, then organizations would have another way to encourage and facilitate knowledge sharing among their employees.;The purpose of this dissertation was to look for evidence to support a relationship between knowledge sharing behaviors and organizational commitment. This dissertation surveyed 302 engineers and engineering managers about their knowledge sharing behaviors and individual levels of organizational commitment. Data was analyzed using two subgroups, dependent on the location where the survey instrument was completed.;Statistically significant, negative relationships were found between Knowledge Donating and Continuance Commitment (rho = -0.188) and Knowledge Collecting and Continuance Commitment (rho = -0.156) for the Symposia-centric subgroup. Statistically significant, positive relationships were found between Knowledge Donating and Affective Commitment (rho = 0.33), Knowledge Donating and Normative Commitment (rho = 0.30), and Knowledge Collecting and Affective Commitment (rho = 0.20) for the Work-centric subgroup. Furthermore, results showed differences in levels of organizational commitment that depended on the location where the survey was completed.