An Empirical Study Of Perceived Knowledge Ownership And Knowledge Sharing

In practice, knowledge has become the source of sustainable competitive advantage of organizations (Drucker,2001), and was the initial impetus of the enterprise value. Bock&Kim (2002) believed that to obtain the sustainable competitive advantage, the most important was the ability to facilitate organizational innovation through the interaction and knowledge sharing between employees, and knowledge sharing was the most important part of effective knowledge management. However, knowledge worker is the source of information and knowledge in the organization, while the use of knowledge is hampered by the division of functions and sector boundaries, so most of the organizational knowledge is still controlled by the individual who initially created and had access to. Therefore, to study the factors affecting individual knowledge sharing in the organization is very important.Argote et al.,(2003) proposed three factors affecting knowledge sharing:the characteristics of units, the characteristics of relationships between units, as well as the characteristics of knowledge. The researches on how characteristics of knowledge affect knowledge creation, sharing and transfer mainly focus on the tacitness of knowledge and the degree to code, but existing studies have ignored the importance of other properties of knowledge, such as knowledge is a public or private. Uzzi&Lancaster (2003) found that the distinction of public and private knowledge was different from the distinction of explicit and implicit knowledge, and that the ownership of knowledge was more important to understand the knowledge transfer. Thus, this study is to explore whether the characteristics of knowledge ownership, especially the individual psychological perception of knowledge ownership will affect individual knowledge sharing.There are conflict results of existing researches on how perceived knowledge ownership affects individual knowledge sharing, and this study hopes to reveal the essence of the perceived knowledge ownership, and to explore its impact on individual knowledge sharing and internal mechanisms through empirical research. Perceived knowledge ownership is divided into perceived organizational ownership and perceived self ownership, and the two are different constructs which can co-exist. As a normative power, perceived organizational ownership of knowledge can directly promote knowledge sharing, because it helps people ignore the cost-benefit considerations and see knowledge sharing as a pro-social behavior. And because the individual’s knowledge structure constitutes the unique personal competitive advantage, motivation is especially important to encourage the individual to share his/her own knowledge. This study proposes intrinsic and extrinsic motivation has played an important moderating role in the relationship between perceived knowledge ownership and knowledge sharing intension. Through the literature review, we choose enjoyment in helping others and reciprocal relationship respectively as representative constructs of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to further explore their roles.Through empirical research of data from663employees of26companies in four cities in Yangtze River Delta, we draw the following conclusions:the perceived organizational ownership of knowledge has a positive impact, while the perceived self ownership has a negative impact on individual knowledge sharing intension; reciprocal relationship plays a moderating role in the relationship between perceived self ownership and knowledge sharing intension; but the moderation effect of enjoyment in helping others has not been verified.