A Communal Resource Perspective on Knowledge Sharing

Equipped with a construct of knowledge applied across a variety of empirical settings, the central quest for knowledge management researchers became performance enhancement through organizational enabling conditions, processes of knowledge capture, sharing, transfer and creation. Despite the existing research activities, the opportunities on knowledge management are still vast. In particular, we still do not know enough how people in the same organization would share knowledge from a perspective of communal resource. Specifically, this paper aims to provide empirical evidence to the concept of ‘communal resource’ proposed by von Krogh (2002) and verify the impact of ‘communal resources’ on knowledge sharing. This study is particularly important to understand why and under what kinds of conditions do people in organizations share knowledge in a collective action framework.