Exploring the Linkage between Knowledge Assets and Knowledge Sharing Behavior: the Role of Psychological Safety, Role Ambiguity and Organizational Identification

Purpose - Healthcare organizations are required to combine their different expertise and to continuously improve their knowledge assets to be effective and produce value for patients (Hansen et al., 1999). Despite their centrality for the quality of clinical practice, however, administrators of healthcare organizations are experiencing significant difficulties in leveraging the potential of the knowledge assets they already own. Attempts to provide the necessary integration between intellectual capital management and knowledge management, however, clash with a growing evidence that we still lack a clear understanding of how knowledge assets are supposed to affect knowledge-related behaviors. As a result, two main research questions will be addressed: (a) how do different typologies of Intellectual Capital affect knowledge sharing behaviors among health professionals? (b) which are the main organizational factors that affect the linkage between Intellectual Capital and knowledge sharing behaviors? Design - We conceptualize knowledge assets in terms of Intellectual Capital (Subramaniam and Youndt, 2005), a multi-dimensional construct comprising human, social and organizational capital. The conceptualisation of employees' knowledge sharing behavior is informed by Huy et al.'s (2010) articulation which comprises the dimensions of sharing best practices, sharing mistakes and searching for feedbacks. The effects of organizational knowledge assets on individual employees' knowledge sharing behavior is supposedly mediated by a set of important organization and team-level variables, namely: (a) psychological safety; (b) role ambiguity and (c) organizational identification. To collect data, we administered a self-compiled questionnaire to health professionals from three hospice and palliative care organizations (H&PCOs). Scales for each construct were crafted based on relevant literature. A total of 108 completed questionnaires were returned from two H&PCOs after the first survey wave (representing a 94.7% response rate). Analysis and findings are based on these 108 questionnaires. Originality/value - This research addresses an understudied topic as it clarifies the linkage between organizational knowledge assets and individuals' knowledge sharing behaviors. Our results suggest that the components of intellectual capital have differentiated impacts on knowledge sharing behaviors, with important mediations by organizational factors. In particular, the results provide empirical evidence that sharing best practices and sharing mistakes are affected by two distinct sets of factors - and thus empirical support to the notion that these two behaviors need to be studied separately. Specifically, social capital has a strong and positive impact on psychological safety which, in turn, significantly affects sharing mistakes. On the other hand, organizational capital has a strong and negative impact on role ambiguity, but no impact on knowledge sharing. Last, human capital has a strong and positive impact on organizational identification which, in turn, significantly affects sharing best practices. Practical Implications - Clarifying the linkage between intellectual capital and knowledge sharing provides significant support to managers of healthcare organizations because it specifies which intellectual capital initiatives should be prioritized to sustain knowledge sharing and how they need to be integrated with each other. Our contribution also sheds a light on the organizational conditions (psychological safety, role ambiguity and organizational identification) that managers need to control for and facilitate in order to exploit the potential of knowledge assets.