Contribute knowledge to knowledge management systems in Chinese enterprises : culture influences, motivators, and inhibitors

Abstract

One of the main objectives of organizations’ knowledge management systems (KMS) implementation is to facilitate an effective transformation of employees’ individual knowledge into organizational knowledge. Nevertheless, employees’ propensity of hoarding their knowledge makes many organizations fail to obtain the expected benefits from KMS adoption. Therefore, both practitioners and academics have paid increasing attention to explore employees’ motivation in contributing knowledge to KMS. However, within this stream of research, most of the studies were conducted in the Western countries. We therefore know little about knowledge sharing practice in other countries which have large culture distance from the West. This study aims to fill in the gap in the literature by investigating Chinese employees’ motivational factors of knowledge contribution to EKRs (electronic knowledge repository, a type of KMS), with particular consideration of Chinese culture influence. Taking the Functionalist Strategy for Personality and Social Behavior as the theoretical backbone, our study developed a research model and identified that three motivational factors, i.e. reputation, evaluation apprehension, and knowledge reciprocity significantly influence Chinese employees’ knowledge contribution; three indigenous Chinese personality attributes (internalized value of Chinese social cultures), gaining face, fear of losing face, and Renqing have a positive influence on these motivational factors. A survey, which involved 386 employees from a Chinese software company, was conducted to test the research model. The results provided support to all the hypotheses proposed. This study has both important theoretical and practical implications. It reveals that knowledge management needs to take culture influence into consideration and enables a deeper understanding of knowledge sharing in China. Based on the results of this study, enterprises could design effective intervention schemes to promote Chinese employees’ knowledge contribution to KMS.