Knowledge sharing is the organizational process whereby various channels of interactions are involved in the interconnection of individuals to pursue and accomplish organizational goals through means such as social networks, informal and formal meetings and dialog (Yang, 2009). The literature suggests that intra-organizational knowledge sharing keeps knowledge and information obtained from various sources up-to-date and serves as a guide for future action (Hsu and Wang, 2008). Knowledge sharing is the critical means through which employees can contribute to knowledge application, innovation and ultimately the competitive advantage.
Knowledge Sharing Orientation (KSO) is defined as the “tendency in the organization to facilitate, encourage and reward knowledge exchange with the motive of capturing tacit and explicit learning gained by the employees” (Farooq, 2012, p. 26). KSO is one of the important dimensions of knowledge management orientation (Vij and Sharma, 2004). Knowledge sharing-oriented knowledge management practices include: appointment of facilitators to help people better express what they know so that others can understand it; making knowledge sharing behaviors an integral part of performance appraisal system; depriving people of some organizational benefits for not sharing the knowledge; and publicly recognizing and rewarding the knowledge sharing employees. In such an atmosphere, people do not have any reservations while parting with their tacit knowledge.
Business performance is considered as a complex multidimensional construct. The measure of performance may be objective (available in financial statements) or perceived/subjective. The use of subjective measure is a common practice in strategy-related research when financial statement data is unavailable or they do not allow for accurate comparisons among the firms. Moreover, literature shows that there is a high correlation between subjective and objective measures of performance (Dess and Robinson, 1984).
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