An Empirical Study On The Influence Of Organizational Trust To Knowledge Sharing

With the era of knowledge economy, more and more researchers and managers have realized that knowledge is as important as human resources, capital, technology. Naturally, a new topic becomes hot in Academia and Business, that is knowledge management. Access to knowledge is the premise of knowledge management, and the most economical way to get knowledge is knowledge sharing, because knowledge sharing can improve the utilization of employee’s private knowledge and create value-added benefits for the organization. More importantly, it can help organizations achieve sustained competitive advantage.Therefore, researchers eager to find the way leading to effective knowledge-sharing within organizations.In practice, information technology has solved technical problems of knowledge sharing, such as Knowledge Base System, e-mail, internal network, which provides a convenient channel for communication and also enables knowledge sharing easier, though it’s hard to improve staffs sharing motive. How to improve knowledge sharing in the existing technology level? Some scholars began to explore the human factors affecting knowledge sharing, such as organizational justice, organizational support, organizational climate, organizational satisfaction, pay incentives and other factors, the relevant literature has also been very rich, but organizational trust, as the psychological motivation for knowledge sharing, only in its infancy. Based on these, the impact of organizational trust on knowledge sharing will be the core issues of this study.This paper reviewed relevant literature on organizational trust and knowledge sharing both at home and abroad, then from a different perspective divide organizational trust into system-based trust, affect-based trust and cognition-based trust, knowledge sharing is divided into knowledge contribution and knowledge acquisition. First, the paper analyzes the internal mechanism of organizational trust and knowledge sharing, then the paper further explores the impact between the different types of organizational trust and the different types of knowledge sharing behavior, and to build an conceptual model.Based on the theoretical analysis, this paper presents hypotheses and selects scale of domestic and foreign scholars on a small sample to test and improve the scale, then collects data to analyze. The main conclusions are as follows:1.Personal property variables and business property variables had a significant impact on various dimensions of organizational trust and knowledge sharing. For example, Staff over the age of40pay more attention to the competence, reliability and credibility than younger, and their cognition-based trust is in the highest level.2.The three dimensions of organizational trust are closely linked. System-based trust, cognition-based trust, affect-based trust has a positive correlation between each other. Sound rules and regulations, good culture and incentive system can improve staff confidence, system-based trust can promote cognition-based trust among employees, cognition-based trust promote affect-based trust among employees further.3.The two dimensions of Knowledge sharing have a close relationship. Knowledge contribution and knowledge acquisition have a positive correlation, which reflects the process of knowledge-sharing. The more one gained knowledge from others, the more this one would contribute their own knowledge. In turn, knowledge contribute promote greater knowledge access, the positive interaction result in a higher level of knowledge sharing behavior.4.Organizational trust on the impact of knowledge sharing is the center of this paper, system-based trust, cognition-based trust, affect-based trust contribute to knowledge acquisition because they have positive predictive power. Among them, the impact of cognition-based trust on knowledge acquisition is more significant, As a person in the acquisition of knowledge, the more stress is placed on another person’s capacity, reliability and credibility, rather than their intimacy; compared to cognition-based trust, the impact of affect-based trust on knowledge contribution is more significant. In general, the higher the degree of organizational trust, the more knowledge sharing, so organizational trust can made knowledge sharing behavior more active, more easily achieved.Finally, the paper discusses some measures to improve organizational trust and knowledge sharing behavior in areas of institutional system, corporate culture, incentives and communication channels, in order to provide a reference to the relevant researchers and business managers.