An Empirical Study Of Organizational Justice And Knowledge Sharing

In the era of knowledge economy, knowledge has become the source of sustainable competitive advantage of organizations (Drucker,2001). Many companies have realized the importance of knowledge resource, and they are trying to improve the process of creating, using and sharing knowledge. However, the results of their actions do not come easily as they thought. When the employees are not willing to share knowledge, even to deny, the purpose of transferring the knowledge to the company’s ownership will be so difficult (Bock et al.,2005). Therefore, to study the factors affecting individual knowledge sharing in the organization is very important.A lot of studies have been done to analyze the influential factors of knowledge sharing. Usually there are four angles to look:organization, individual, individual relations and channels (Eriksson & Dickson,2000), like organizational motivations, managerial support, individual attitudes, efficacy and so on. Even though the subject of knowledge sharing has gotten lots of attention, there is still a space of the study of psychological mechanism need to be done. As the basic needs of people, organizational justice can influence knowledge sharing in a positive way (Kathryn,2002). But the mechanism behind their relations has not been explained. Pierce described a psychology variable named Organizational Psychological Ownership as a feeling of possession of the organization. Employees with this feeling will be dependable on and feel belong to the organization, and consider the organization as "home". They will be more willing to devote and sacrifice to the organization. The Organizational Psychological Ownership can analyze and explain the individual psychological mechanism of specific attitudes and actions.This paper studied the organizational factors that influence knowledge sharing behaviors, based on the logic that the organizational environmental can influence individual psychological recognition so as to influence the organizational behavior. We use the concept of Organizational Psychological Ownership as the explanation of relation between organizational regulations and employees’ knowledge sharing behaviors. We propose the study model that organizational justice can improve the knowledge sharing behaviors by organizational psychological ownership as the mediator, in the view of organizational psychology. As the same time, we also try to testify the moderate effect of collectivism between the organizational justice and organizational psychological ownership. We are trying to provide a theoretical guidance for the practice.Through empirical research of data from 559 employees of 11 companies in different cities in Yangtze River Delta, by the software of SPSS 18.0, we draw the following conclusions:the perceived organizational justice (including the divisional and procedural justice) can positively influence the knowledge sharing behaviors; also the mediate effect of organizational psychological ownership between the organizational justice and knowledge sharing has been confirmed. But the moderate effect of collectivism between organizational justice (including the divisional and procedural justice) and organizational psychological ownership has not been verified. These results have shown us the importance of organizational justice, even the culture of collectivism cannot change its act on individual attitude.