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1. Introduction
Knowledge sharing is the process by which employees mutually exchange their tacit and explicit knowledge (Nonaka, 2007) to create new knowledge. Tacit knowledge resides in the minds of the employees and consists of the “know-how” and skills that individuals have acquired on the basis of personal experience. Explicit knowledge is knowledge that has been written down in manuals or guides to be shared or communicated to other employees in the organization, who will then also possess this knowledge without having to have the same experience (Newell et al., 2009). “Explicit knowledge sharing requires less effort of an employee to share than tacit knowledge” (Hau et al., 2013). According to Von Krogh et al. (2012), social practices do not only evolve and refine employees’ tacit and explicit knowledge. Under certain conditions, such as a history of interaction, their members also pursue higher collective standards of excellence related to their work. Knowledge sharing is intertwined with other knowledge processes including knowledge flow, transfer, learning, distributed collaboration and knowledge creation (Foss et al., 2010; Fayard and Metiu, 2014). “Knowledge sharing involves a set of behaviors that aid the exchange of acquired knowledge “(Chow and Chan, 2008).
Knowledge sharing is considered to be an important process of social interaction in organizations (Lin, 2007; Van den Hooff et al., 2012; Ardichvili et al., 2003) and occurs at individual, group or organizational levels. At the individual and group level, knowledge sharing comprises both knowledge “donation” and knowledge “collection” (Lin, 2007; Van den Hooff et al., 2012). Knowledge donation involves the employees’ motivation to actively communicate with colleagues, as well as consult with colleagues to learn from them (i.e. knowledge collection). At the organizational level, knowledge sharing may be defined as capturing, organizing, reusing and transferring the experience-based knowledge which resides within the organization and making that knowledge available to all employees (Lin, 2007).
“Knowledge sharing is designed to transform individual into organizational knowledge” (Foss et al., 2010). Knowledge sharing involves leveraging both personal and collective knowledge, and the synergetic articulation of personal into collective knowledge may be facilitated by the adoption of social media platforms (Razmerita et al., 2014). Within this study, social media platforms or enterprise social media refers to...