Influencing factors of knowledge creation and knowledge sharing intention among university academicians in a public university in Malaysia

Abstract

The importance of Knowledge Management (KM) for success of any organization is well documented. As a result, many facets of KM have been investigated including in higher educational institutions (HEI). However, more studies are needed as most of the previous works, especially on HEIs in Malaysia, have focused only on knowledge sharing (KS) among academicians. Therefore, the main focus of this study is to investigate the KM intention among university academicians in a Malaysian HEI. This study seeks to investigate academicians’ perceived intention in KM initiatives and its predictors. A conceptual framework was developed based on the theory of reasoned action (TRA) and the theory of planned behavior (TPB). Intention to be involved in KM was operationalized based on knowledge creation theory (SECI process). Six independent variables representative of the socio cultural nature of KM - trust, management support, decentralization, IT support, performance expectancy (PE), and effort expectancy (EE) - were considered as the predictors of KM intention. Data were collected from 156 academicians from a public university in Malaysia using questionnaires. The questionnaire items were adapted from previous studies. Data were analyzed using SPSS 17. During the data reduction process, factor loading of 0.4 was considered as the threshold value. The finding of descriptive analysis confirmed the positive intention towards Knowledge Creation (KC) and Knowledge Sharing (KS) of respondents. Finally, the regression analysis confirmed that out of seven proposed hypotheses, Trust, PE and EE influence KM Intention. Even though further research works are needed to generalize the findings, the current research and the findings can enrich the KM literature, and provide some insights to the decision makers of the selected HEI on the appropriate KM implementation.