Factors affecting knowledge sharing in a private higher education / Hafiza Adenan

Currently, Malaysia shifts towards building a knowledge-based society; therefore, higher education institutions (HEIs) particularly private HEIs now face ever growing demands for sharing quality resources and expertise. Consequently, knowledge sharing in academia has become a rising concern. As known, knowledge sharing among academic staffs would enhance the capability and quality of teaching and research undertaken by the private HEIs. Hence, the private HEIs should implement various efforts to develop more effective knowledge sharing among academic staffs. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify and investigate how and why the individual, organizational and technological factors can hinder or stimulate knowledge sharing among academic staffs at a private HEI. The qualitative methodology that is multiple case studies were applied to achieve the study’s purpose. In-depth interview, focus group interview and document analysis formed the data collection method for this study. The in-depth interviews were done with four academic staffs of a private HEI, while, the focus group consisted with five academic staffs as the respondents. The theory of Planned Behavior by Ajzen (1991) and Social Technical approach by Pan and Scarbrough (1998) were used to determine and explore the individual, organizational and technological factors that able to stimulate or inhibit Malaysian private academic staffs’ knowledge sharing behavior. The study’s findings had found that the private HEI academic staffs’ cognitive ability, affective and behavioral attitude towards trust, self-efficacy, communication and difference in culture, lack of time and loosing ownership of knowledge have stimulated or inhibit their knowledge sharing. The organizational factors that able to stimulate their knowledge sharing were management support, leadership style, rewards and incentives associated with performance assessment and job satisfaction. On the other hand, work load and time constraint, organizational structure pertaining to communication and faculty location are perceived by them as inhibiting their knowledge sharing. Besides that, lack of information technology support and lack of systems expertise resulting in the continuous unsupported technical problems able to inhibit them from sharing their knowledge. The Islamic religious value was the new individual factor derived from the study’s findings. The study also produced proposed model of private academic staffs’ knowledge sharing behavior. The recommendations of the study are implementation of work design emphasize on team building, cross training, communication skill training, personal development training, information communication technology application training, allocation of specific reward and recognition for excellent knowledge contributor, develop mentoring and coaching programme and implementing recruitment and selection process emphasize on knowledge sharing oriented.