Eagerness and Willingness to Share: the Relevance of Different Attitudes towards Knowledge Sharing

This paper focuses on individuals’ attitudes towards knowledge sharing. Beside a person’s willingness to share knowledge, we also distinguish eagerness to share, defined as the extent to which an individual has a strong internal drive to communicate their individual intellectual capital to others. The foundations for this distinction are discussed, and hypotheses are presented concerning the relationship of these different attitudes to different ways of knowledge sharing. Our empirical results show a distinction in attitudes similar to the eagerness/willingness distinction, which is related to norms of collectivism and individualism. These attitudes are found to have consequences for knowledge sharing behavior: willing individuals tend to collect more knowledge than they donate, whereas eager people donate and collect in equal degrees. Also, eagerness is positively related to knowledge donating, where willingness is positively related to both donating and collecting. In order to further investigate the meaning of this distinction, however, it needs to be operationalized more sharply.