Employees choice of knowledge sharing tools in a global firm : a study of MNC employee's choice of formal or informal knowledge sharing tools

摘要

Due to changes in the competitive landscape and increasing globalisation,resources and the most effective use of these has become the key to competitiveadvantage for most multinational firms. As employees are in the possession ofunique knowledge and expertise, employees have become an important resourcefor firms, and thus efficient transfer of knowledge to other part of theorganisation, has become vital for business survival (Lin and Joe 2012;Karkoulian and Mahseredjian 2012). Knowledge sharing is an emerging andincreasingly popular theme within in the academic literature, where research hasfocused on the different impacts on employee’s willingness to share knowledge(Argote et al. 2003). However, little existing research has focused on the impactson employees choice of knowledge sharing tools, thus this thesis aims to fill thisgap in literature, by examining how established and emerging impacts on thewillingness to share knowledge, namely intrinsic motivation, introjectedmotivation, external motivation, network centrality, intra-firm competition and theuse of organisational rewards, impacts employees choice of formal or informalknowledge sharing tools in a local and global context of multinational companies.In addition the thesis aims to examine how the use of one type of knowledgesharing tool impacts the use of the other, meaning whether they substitute orcomplement each other.The research was conducted in the Norwegian subsidiary of the multinational ITcompanyIBM, with respondents who worked on both local and global teams. Outof 650 possible respondents, we received 154 responses.The results revealed that contrary to our believes, motivation does not have asignificant impact on employee’s choice of knowledge sharing tools, with theexception of external motivation, which was slightly significant for the use ofinformal knowledge sharing tools. The results also showed that the use of rewardshad no impact on the choice of knowledge sharing tools. Intra-firm competitionhad a positive correlation with the use of formal knowledge sharing tools;however the level of employee’s network centrality had the highest effect on boththe choice of formal and informal knowledge sharing tools. Additionally, theresults showed that the two types of knowledge sharing tools complement eachother, rather than having a substitution effect.