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To cite this document:
Vilma Vuori Jussi Okkonen, (2012),"Knowledge sharing motivational factors of using an intra-organizational social media platform", Journal
of Knowledge Management, Vol. 16 Iss 4 pp. 592 - 603
Permanent link to this document:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/13673271211246167
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Abstract
Purpose This paper aims to discuss the motivational factors affecting the knowledge sharing through
an intra-organizational social media platform and to answer the following research questions: What
motivates employees to share their knowledge through an intra-organizational social media platform?;
What impedes them sharing knowledge this way?; and Do these factors differ from those motivational
factors regarding knowledge sharing in general?.
Vilma Vuori and
Jussi Okkonen are both
Post-doc Researchers in
the Department of Business
Information Management
and Logistics, Tampere
University of Technology,
Tampere, Finland.
Design/methodology/approach The paper approaches the issue from both theoretical and empirical
viewpoints. The motivational factors regarding knowledge sharing in general are summed up from
literature. The social media platform perspective to the issue is studied by conducting a survey in two
companies.
Findings The results reveal that the motivation to share knowledge through an intra-organizational
social media platform is the desire to help the organization reach its goals and helping colleagues, while
financial rewards and advancing ones career were seen as least motivating. The key issues enabling
the success of using a collaborative intra-organizational social media platform in knowledge sharing are
in line with the general knowledge sharing motivational factors, although supplemented with some
additional features: reciprocity in knowledge sharing, making every-day work easier and faster and ease
of use are the key factors that make or break the success.
Originality/value The empirical study reveals what motivates and impedes the employees of the
companies to share knowledge via an intra-organizational social media platform. The results are
discussed in the light of those from earlier research about general knowledge sharing motivational
factors.
Keywords Social media, Motivation, Barriers, Knowledge sharing, Organizational culture, Employees
Paper type Case study
1. Introduction
In contemporary organizations leverage in information management and refinement is
sought from several sources. Novel approaches, such as social media applications (see
e.g. Vuori and Okkonen, 2012; Luoma and Okkonen, 2009; Razmerita et al., 2009;
Grossman, 2008; Levy, 2009), are found useful in work context, especially when embedded
to other information systems. In work context it is assumed that people use the tools that are
issued, yet the question remains: how efficiently those tools are used? The usage is an issue
of organizational conventions and individual working habits, but taking advantage of
non-conventional tools personal motivation of using those tools and motivation to share
knowledge play the key roles. In addition, the fact with most people is that avoiding excess
work is somewhat of an endogenous attribute.
PAGE 592
Knowledge sharing per se has been studied a lot, and the general motivational factors
affecting employees knowledge sharing are well known (see e.g. Bock and Kim, 2002; Ipe,
2003; Riege, 2005; Bock et al., 2005; Lin, 2007; Barachini, 2009; Gagne, 2009; Holste and
Fields, 2010; Suppiah and Sandhu, 2010). Starting, for example, from Hendriks (1999),
Cabrera and Cabrera (2002) or Ardichvili et al. (2003) to more recent approaches of Hsu and
VOL. 16 NO. 4 2012, pp. 592-603, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1367-3270
DOI 10.1108/13673271211246167
Chuan-Chuan Lin (2006) and Lin (2007) motivational factors could be categorized as
intrinsic or extrinsic, that is, internal or external factors also in the context of using ICT.
Motivational factors can be divided into intrinsic and extrinsic (see e.g. Ryan and Deci, 2000;
Lin, 2007), that is, those internal and those external to an individual. According to Ryan and
Deci (2000) intrinsic motivation is a drive to do something that is self-rewarding and extrinsic
motivation is a drive to do something for external sanction. In the case of extrinsic motivation
the issue is either to avoid negative sanction or to gain positive sanction. However, even if
extrinsic motivation is more obvious, and easily comprehended, there are also some
underlying intrinsic factors as well, for example, someone wanting financial rewards for
altruistic reasons.
Intrinsic motivation is derived directly from the work itself (Frey, 2002, p. 75), for example
altruism as in feeling good about doing the work in the first place, regardless if there is no
extra reward. Knowledge self-efficacy and enjoyment in helping others are also distinct
motivational factors (Lin, 2007). Moreover, the main point on intrinsic motivation is to do
something that externally may seem utterly pointless, but leads internally to fulfillment and is
thus self-rewarding.
feeling empowered;
Jeon et al. (2011a) find that even though both extrinsic and intrinsic motivational factors have
a positive effect on knowledge sharing attitudes in communities-of-practice, the intrinsic
factors (e.g. enjoyment in helping others and need for affiliation) were more significant.
Paroutis and Al Saleh (2011) studied employees willingness to use and contribute to social
media platforms, and found that factors affecting knowledge sharing were related to old
habits of doing things, expected benefits and rewards, perceived support from the
organization and management, and trust issues. Motivation could also be an issue of
affordance, that is, those features of a system that enable or restrict its use (Hartson, 2003).
According to Bower (2008) expected utility of using a tool, in this case a social media
platform, causes affordance and leads to motivation to use it and eventually to knowledge
sharing motivation.
It is not enough to give permission and prerequisites for knowledge sharing, but the
motivational factors need to be actively fostered and enhanced (Bock and Kim, 2002). All
the motivational factors are not straight-forward fostered. For example, offering a tangible
reward for employees who actively share knowledge is seen as a good way to motivate
them to share (Ipe, 2003; Swart and Kinnie, 2003; Jeon et al., 2011a). However, research
(Kohn, 1993; Bock and Kim, 2002) also shows that rewards only work temporarily, as long
as they are provided, but do not permanently change the attitude towards knowledge
sharing. In fact, using rewards is a double-edged sword: rewards can even impede
knowledge sharing (Kohn, 1993). The effect of rewarding is especially underlined in the
case of low expected utility of sharing: rewards temporarily boost knowledge sharing, but
as there seems to be no utility except the reward, people shift to other activities with
higher expectation of utility.
Does the organizational culture of the case companies set barriers for knowledge
sharing?
Q2.
What would motivate the employees to share knowledge through a social media
platform?
Q3.
What would impede the employees to share knowledge through a social media
platform?
In order to answer these questions it was necessary to have the case companies employees
themselves as data sources. The perspective of the study is therefore that of the employees,
although the answers enlighten also the companies overall situation, as described by the
employees.
The data was gathered using a web questionnaire which was considered as a suitable
technique considering the objectives of the study: the aim was to reach a large group of
people in a rather short period of time, and to find out averages, majorities and an overall
picture (Ghauri and Grnhaug, 2005). The questionnaire was available via case companies
intranet for two weeks in February 2010. Anyone who had access to the intranet had the
theoretical opportunity to answer the questionnaire. In practice only those who actually saw
the announcement in the intranet ever had the chance to actually participate, and so the
questionnaire used non-random sampling (Kehoe and Pitkow, 1996).
The problem with online questionnaires is that the response rate cannot usually be
calculated accurately (see e.g. Kaye and Johnson, 1999; Couper, 2000; Bowen et al., 2009).
The information about the amount of people who visited the company intranet (and
subsequently had the chance to notice the request to answer the questionnaire) during the
time the questionnaire was open for answering was not available. Hence, the response rate
(rr) was calculated as suggested by Eysenbach and Wyatt (2002) and Kaye and Johnson
(1999) as follows:
rr
Using the equation above the calculated response rate was 48 percent. The final amount of
completed responses was altogether 148.
As the concept of a social media platform may be understood differently depending on the
person and context in question, it was necessary to build a unanimous understanding of
what was meant by it in the questionnaire. To achieve this, the recipients were given the
following definition of an intra-organizational social media platform:
Collaborative platform can be defined as a set of software components and software services
that enable individuals to find each other and the information they need and to be able to
communicate and work together to achieve common business goals (see e.g. Wikipedia).
The term social media was replaced with collaborative or collaboration. This was done
for the sake of clarity, as social media is still a fairly ambiguous term and could have
distracted the respondents. Therefore the platform was described by the actions it would
enable, that is, collaboration and knowledge sharing.
The questionnaire used five-point likert scale questions. A five-point scale was chosen since
it gives a wide enough variety of alternatives and provides also a neutral alternative. In
addition to fixed-end likert scale questions, the respondents could explain and complete
their answers with their own words in comment boxes after each question.
Pearsons Chi-square test for independence was performed on parts of the questionnaire
data in order to identify possible statistical significances and connections between two
categorical variables. The interest was to find out whether individual features, such as age or
familiarity with social media, affected the respondents answers significantly. The test
Chi-square value calculation is done as follows:
X2
XX f 0 2 f s
fs
where is the observed frequency and is the expected frequency based on the null
hypothesis (see e.g. Alkula et al., 1994). The significance level for tests in the study was
chosen to be five per cent ( p# 0.05). The statistical tests were made using Microsoft Excel
and SAS Enterprise Guide software.
4.48
4.33
3.90
3.73
3.26
3.04
2.91
2.62
2.17
1
important from everyones own perspective, sharing knowledge with others is still
considered problematic.
Companies naturally have to keep important knowledge safe, which can also lead to a very
protective attitude towards knowledge. In the case companies this has led to quite a strict
information security policy that in some cases was considered excessive. People do not
have access to other segments or units information systems, although there could be
valuable knowledge that should cross organizational borders. In addition to motivational
factors the knowledge sharing efficiency depended also on the opportunities to share.
Knowledge sharing was experienced to be somewhat cumbersome because of insufficient
access to knowledge over organizational borders and lack of sufficient channels for
knowledge sharing.
4.40
4.04
3.99
3.99
3.98
3.77
3.76
3.71
3.67
3.78
(I) I am curious
3.29
3.04
2.94
2.50
2.41
2.33
2.28
Notes: Divided into intrinsic (I) and extrinsic (E). 1 = not at all; 5 = extremely much
Overall the respondents seemed to be quite eager to share knowledge if the motivational
factors would be in place: the average of the answers was 3.40 and the lowest mean was
2.28 (expecting promotion opportunities). The respondents were positive about sharing
knowledge through an intra-organizational social media platform.
Even though financial rewards were seen as one of the least motivating factors, the
complementary comments revealed that some kind of rewarding was seen as a good way to
motivate employees to change the current practices (e.g. excessive e-mailing, storing
information in several databases) towards using a social media platform. According to
several respondents, praise and words of thanks from the superiors were seen as motivating
factors, where as plain orders and obligation to share knowledge would just turn people
against it, or at least it would defect the quality of knowledge.
The results show that the best way to motivate the respondents to use a social media
platform for knowledge sharing would be assuring them that by using the platform their work
load will not increase but it will facilitate and ease their work instead.
Statistical testing (Pearson Chi-Square test) was used to find out how the respondents age
and overall familiarity with social media affected their answers. The Chi-Square test was
performed for the top three motivating factors and age, and again with the familiarity. The
results did not show any significant dependency between the factors ( p . 0.05 in all cases).
According to the results the barriers were not significantly present in the companies: on a
scale from 1 to 5, 1 was the mode in almost every question (Figure 2). This indicates that
respondents do not find these factors inhibit their knowledge sharing but are fairly keen to
share their knowledge to others in their company.
2.92
2.61
2.29
2.28
1.96
1.89
2.22
2.10
1.69
1.67
1.62
I am afraid of criticism
1.51
1.49
1.49
1.46
1.46
1
The most significant barrier was concern that it would take too much time and effort to share
knowledge through a social media platform. If the platform is not easy to use and it does not
benefit the users by making their work easier, they will not want to use it but will stick to their
current ways of working and sharing knowledge. A third of the comments in the questionnaire
could be summarized as two statements: using a collaborative platform takes too much
time and hanging in this kind of a company Facebook site is not real working but a waste of
time. Respondents greatest concern about knowledge sharing via a social media platform is
the assumption that it either increases the workload, takes excessive time from the actual
work, or is inefficient altogether. Some of this may spring from a traditional perception of what
working is, which does not include chatting or sharing links.
Another concern was that a social media platform would be just another information system.
As there are already many information systems the employees are obligated to use even if
they do not find them beneficial to themselves, it is understandable that they are not too
eager to learn how to use yet another information system to contribute to. Respondents
suspected that most people would still be clinging to the current practices and channels of
knowledge sharing even if new ones would ease the workload in the long run. It is also seen
that some, often ageing, employees are not willing or able to adopt new ways of working or
use new technologies. To study whether age had any significance to the barriers, Chi-square
tests were performed to find out if the age and overall familiarity had an effect on the
responses. In this case, too, no significant effect was found between these background
factors and the responses ( p . 0.05).
should be implicit: reciprocity in knowledge sharing, making every-day work easier and
faster and ease of use are the key factors that make or break the success. Moreover, there
might be several intervening factors that explain usage or non-usage. The issue of using
social media platforms was not approached from that perspective and therefore the results
this far concern using platform only from the perspective of the users.
The results discussed in this paper underline the importance of intrinsic motivation, but the
analysis is based on operationalization done by the authors. The issue of intrinsic or extrinsic
motivation was not directly asked nor explained to the respondents. It is not a shortcoming
per se, yet it should be taken in account when evaluating the findings. The findings, and
therefore the conclusions, were based on partial analysis of a larger survey thus there might
be at least some gaps, for example, descriptive nature of the results. Moreover, due to
sampling used for survey the results remain descriptive and explorative. As presented
above, any strong correlations between presented factors cannot be made. For such results
more comprehensive research should be conducted, yet the results of this paper serve
significant role when composing hypothesis for further research. As applying social media
platforms in value creating business activities is novel, this paper serves well as new
opening in the field of managerial information system research.
Most important practical implications rise from respondents attitude towards social media.
As presented above such platform was mainly seen as tool, thus value of such tool is
dependent on perceived value of usage. Especially the motivational factors (see Figure 2)
give important lesson by pointing out the importance on intrinsic motivation. To put it vice
versa: usage of social media platforms cannot be forced as it should be based on
voluntarism and mutual benefit and it cannot be forced.
Further research calls for examining also factors also that might enlighten affordance of
social media platforms. Motivation to use tools and affordance are tightly knit together and
this relationship needs also deeper analysis in order to draw a more complete picture of the
motivational factors of using intra-organizational social media platform in knowledge
sharing. The issue of affordance should be studied more thoroughly in order to enlighten
indirect personal, social and organizational factors.
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