A Dynamic Structural Analysis of Enterprise Knowledge Sharing

Enterprise 2.0 systems (such as employee expertise sharing forums, employee blogs, and internal wikis) have been adopted in a number of organizations to overcome the barriers to intraorganizational knowledge sharing that have emerged as a result of knowledge silos formed over the year. However, organizations are still struggling to understand the knowledge sharing behavior of employees on these systems, in improving the design of these systems and devising policies to enhance knowledge sharing on these systems. Using unique data, on expertise sharing forum, from a Fortune 1000 IT services firm, we present a theoretically grounded dynamic structural model of employee knowledge seeking and sharing behavior. The different incentives for employees to seek and share knowledge (knowledge gain, reputation, and costs) are structurally incorporated in our model. In our model, the employees are forward looking rational individuals who decide when to seek and share knowledge so as to maximize their long term utility. The results indicate that the employees receive utility from sharing knowledge due to reputation gain but loose utility from the time-effort cost of answering; employees also receive utility from seeking knowledge due to knowledge gain but loose utility due to reputation lost and the time-effort cost involved in asking. Furthermore, the results reveal an inherent “reputation divide” among the expertise sharing community where employees with high (low) knowledge level are more likely to respond to requests from employees with high (low) knowledge level than others. We conduct several counterfactuals to investigate the impact of different policies related to system interface and incentive structure design. We find that the firm can bridge the “reputation divide” significantly and increase the extent of knowledge sharing by anonymizing the knowledge seekers but not the sharers.