Essays on knowledge sharing

Researchers in operations strategy highlight the importance of leveraging operational knowledge for building competitive advantage. One way to leverage operational knowledge is to improve the informal exchange of knowledge and ideas among employees. This dissertation comprises three essays in which we investigate the antecedents to knowledge sharing---the aspects involved in creating a work environment where employees have the motivation, opportunity, and ability to share knowledge with their coworkers. Taking both a technical and a social approach to operational design, we search for barriers to knowledge sharing and for managerial interventions to overcome those barriers. The type of knowledge we examine is "tribal knowledge," the tricks-of-the-trade that are built upon people's experience with the processes and workflow they face in their daily work.; In the first essay, we investigate how incentive systems can promote knowledge-sharing behavior. A modified principal-agent model of cooperation in teams is used to derive and analyze optimal incentive systems. We find that there is a trade-off between designing incentives to minimize moral hazard cost, and designing them to facilitate cooperation. We also show how individual and team incentives complement each other as drivers of knowledge sharing behavior.; In the second essay, we develop valid and reliable multi-item measurement scales and use them to assess the antecedents of knowledge sharing within companies. We follow a rigorous process of development, and empirically test the scales for their psychometric properties using structural equation modeling on a sample of 191 employees in 3 companies. We also assess their generalizability among samples and their resistance to common method variance.; In the final essay, we develop and test a theoretical model of employee knowledge-sharing behavior using 9 theory-based submodels. We establish knowledge-sharing behavior as a function of motivation, opportunity, and ability, and empirically identify the main antecedents of motivation and ability. Our integrative approach to model building allows us to compare existing theoretical perspectives and to complement them with ideas linking operations management and organizational behavior.