Building intellectual structure of knowledge sharing
| Date | 03 November 2019 |
| Pages | 136-162 |
| Published date | 03 November 2019 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/VJIKMS-03-2019-0036 |
| Author | Anil Kumar Goswami,Rakesh Kumar Agrawal |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
Building intellectual structure of
knowledge sharing
Anil Kumar Goswami
OB and HRM Area, Indian Institute of Management, Kashipur, Delhi, India and
Defence Research and Development Organization, Delhi, India, and
Rakesh Kumar Agrawal
OB and HRM Area, Indian Institute of Management, Kashipur, Delhi, India
Abstract
Purpose –This study aims to build the intellectual structure of knowledge sharing (KS) research by objectively
and systematically capturing and sketching the content of research papers published in the KS research area.
Design/methodology/approach –This study uses a systematic literature review for data collection,
and content analysis and bibliometric techniques of citation and co-citation analysis for data analyses and
interpretation.
Findings –Based on the study, the intellectual structure of KS research consisting of five themes has emerged.
The five themes identified are: models, frameworks and understanding for KS, the behaviour-oriented
perspective of KS, technology-oriented perspective of KS, KS barriers and KS and firm’sperformance.
Research limitations/implications –This study has used publishedliterature extracted from selected
journalsusing the web of science database. More journals and databasesmay be included in future studies.
Practical implications –This study will give future researchers a comprehensive understanding of KS
discipline and serve as a quick reference and resource for those interested in KS research. It identifies major areas
of KS for the practitioners to enable them to focus and apply various organizational interventions to derive a
competitive advantage. The identified themes in the intellectual structure of KS will also provide a holistic view
and give multiple perspectives to practitioners so that they can better manage KS in their organizations.
Originality/value –This is among early studies aimingto extract the intellectual structure of KS in the
broad area of knowledgemanagement research.
Keywords Knowledge sharing, Intellectual structure, Knowledge management, Systematic
literature review, Bibliometric techniques, Content analysis
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Knowledge-based view of the firm (Bock et al.,2005) and the resource advantage theory
(Grant, 1996) have emphasized knowledge as a critical and a strategic resource of the
organization. Knowledgecan lead not only to value creation but also helpthe firm in gaining
sustainable competitive advantage (Conner and Prahalad, 1996). Knowledge management
(KM) mechanisms thus become crucial for any organization. Knowledge sharing (KS) is a
significant element of the KM. Researchers have emphasized the importance of KS among
people within and outside of the organization (Carmeliet al., 2013) to effectively leverage its
knowledge resources. KS is at the heart of KM (Riege, 2005) in providing a competitive
advantage to the organization (Jackson et al.,2006). It results into innovation (Jackson et al.,
2006), ideas generation and problems solving (Cavaliere and Lombardi, 2015) and
collectively develops organizational and group knowledge (Suppiah and Sandhu, 2011).It is
vital for performance achievement, organizational learning, knowledge creation (Ipe, 2003)
and for enhancing the capacity of people in providing creative solutions and in developing
VJIKMS
50,1
136
Received18 March 2019
Revised4 September 2019
Accepted26 September 2019
VINEJournal of Information and
KnowledgeManagement Systems
Vol.50 No. 1, 2020
pp. 136-162
© Emerald Publishing Limited
2059-5891
DOI 10.1108/VJIKMS-03-2019-0036
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/2059-5891.htm
new services and products (Carmeli et al., 2013). Even though vital and critical, there is a
dearth of research in the KS area (Ipe, 2003) and researchers have just started to unfold its
complex dynamics(Ipe, 2003).
Due to the necessity of and the many potential benefits of KS in managing knowledge
(Ismail Al-Alawi et al.,2007), this paper concentrates on the extraction of the intellectual
structure of KS research. Intellectual structure “refers to a set of salient attributes of the
knowledge base that can provide an organized and holistic understanding of the chosen
scientific domain”(Shafique, 2013, p. 63). It is a set of structural knowledge groups
(Pilkington and Meredith, 2009) or structural patterns from the scientific literature (Chen
and Paul, 2001) that provides the relationship among most influential citations (Pilkington
and Meredith, 2009). It includes the grouping of significant contributions of researchers to a
knowledge domain that reflects intellectual connections (Chen and Paul, 2001). For the
purpose of this study, intellectual structure refers to the structural patterns in terms of
various themes and sub-themes to understand the growth of the KS research area. When a
discipline reaches a maturity level,scholars review its existing literature (Ramos-Rodríguez
and Ruíz-Navarro, 2004) to understandits intellectual structure in building the image of the
discipline. However,a discipline can be examined in terms of its intellectual structureif there
is a fair amount of literature availableto scholars. Although KM is in its embryonic stage as
an academic research discipline, significant numbers of research papers have been
published in this area (Serenko et al., 2010). KS as a part of KM is in its nascent stage; yet
literature suggests that thereis an increase in a number of research papers published in this
area. While a number of studies are availablethat describe the structure and patterns of KM
(Akhavan et al.,2016;Gu, 2004;Qiu and Lv, 2014;Serenko,2013;Serenko and Dumay, 2015),
to the best of authors’knowledge, hardly any study has been conducted to extract the
intellectual structure of KS research. Therefore, extracting the intellectual structure of KS
research is desirable,appropriate and helpful in understanding and exploring theidentity of
KS discipline.
The study aims to build the intellectual structure of KS research by objectively and
systematically capturing and sketching, the content of research papers published in the KS
research area. To fulfill the aim, the study adopts a systematic literature review for data
collection, and the content analysis and bibliometric techniques of citation and co-citation
analysis for data analyses and interpretation. The rest of the paper is organized as follows.
The second section describes the basic understanding of KS, while the third section
describes the methodology. The results and discussion section follows after this. The
conclusion drawn from the study and the contributions and limitations of the study are
presented in the final section.
Conceptual understanding of knowledge sharing
KS is a learning process to assimilateideas of employees of the organization (Hutchings and
Michailova, 2004) where they “mutually exchange their (implicit and explicit) knowledge
and jointly create new knowledge”(Van Den Hooff and De Ridder, 2004, p. 118). There are
two distinct ways of sharing knowledge: through direct contact amongst people (tacit
knowledge) and through written documents (explicit knowledge) (Haas and Hansen, 2007).
Tacit knowledge is primarily shared in face-to-face interactions (Nonaka and Takeuchi,
1995); however, it is also shared by means of training, conferences, informal social networks
and member interactions (Holste and Fields, 2010). Van Den Hooff and De Ridder (2004)
provided two dimensions of KS: knowledge donating,where people voluntary communicate
with others and knowledge collecting, where people access knowledge from colleagues
(Cavaliere and Lombardi, 2015). Teng and Song (2011) identified two aspects of KS:
Intellectual
structure of
knowledge
sharing
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