The Relationship Between Goal Orientation of Salespeople and Their Knowledge Sharing Behaviors: The Moderating Role of Norms

摘要

The knowledge management literature suggests three broad factors that can lead to KSBs: organizational, social/relational, and individual (e.g., Le Bon and Merunka 2006). Notwithstanding, very little is understood regarding what sales organizations can do to foster KSBs, especially with regards to factors that reside at multiple levels. The motivation behind our study rests on two observations that have limited theoretical and practical advancement in sales research. First, prior studies in sales have investigated knowledge sharing (e.g., Davies et al. 2010; Flaherty and Pappas 2009) and goal orientations (e.g., Kohli, Shervani, and Challagalla 1998; Sujan, Weitz, and Kumar 1994) in parallel fashion without efforts to integrate the two. We deem this to be an important gap in the literature that has restricted our understanding of how salespeople with different goal orientations can promote KSBs. The goal orienta-tion-KSB relationship merits attention because knowledge sharing is about the willingness to disseminate what one has learned and goal orientation has been shown to be strongly related to individual learning (Payne, Youngcourt, and Beaubien 2007). Second, we explore the role of knowledge sharing norms on the goal orientation-KSB relationship, investigating the goal orientation—KSB relationship under the contingency lens of norms addresses the long held argument that the motivation to learn and hence share knowledge is different for individuals with different goal orientations. To this end, our study reflects how norms strengthen or weaken the motivation to engage in KSBs for learning- and performance-oriented salespeople.