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Abstract Determining which factors promote or impede the sharing of knowledge within groups and organizations constitutes an important area of research. This paper focuses on three such influences: "organizational commitment," "organizational communication," and the use of a specific instrument of communication - computer-mediated communication (CMC). Two processes of knowledge sharing are distinguished: donating and collecting. A number of hypotheses are presented concerning the influence of commitment, climate and CMC on these processes. These hypotheses were tested in six case studies. The results suggest that commitment to the organization positively influences knowledge donating, and is in turn positively influenced by CMC use. Communication climate is found to be a key variable: a constructive communication climate was found to positively influence knowledge donating, knowledge collecting and affective commitment. Finally, a relationship was found that was not hypothesized: knowledge collecting influences knowledge donating in a positive sense - the more knowledge a person collects, the more he or she is willing to also donate knowledge to others. Based on these results, a number of theoretical and practical implications are discussed, and suggestions for further research are presented.
Keywords Knowledge management, Organizations, Communication management
Introduction
In today's knowledge-intensive economy, an organization's available knowledge is becoming an increasingly important resource. In the "resource-based" view of the firm, knowledge is considered to be the most strategically important resource (e.g. Conner and Prahalad, 1996; Grant, 1996; Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998; Pettigrew and Whip, 1993). The effective management of this resource is, consequently, one of the most important challenges facing today's organizations (Davenport and Prusak, 1998; Drucker, 1993; Hansen et al., 1999). The sharing of knowledge between individuals and departments in the organization is considered to be a crucial process here (O'Dell and Grayson, 1998; Osterloh and Frey, 2000). Only when individual and group knowledge are translated to organizational knowledge can the organization start to effectively manage this resource. Therefore, determining which factors promote or impede the sharing of knowledge within groups and organizations constitutes an important area of research.
In this paper, we focus on two such influences, "organizational commitment" and "organizational communication." Here, "organizational commitment" is understood to refer to the affective commitment of organizational members to their organization, whereas "organizational communication" refers to both the communication climate of the...