Understanding the Antecedents of Knowledge Sharing: An Organizational Justice Perspective

Knowledge sharing is an important variable in the knowledge management literature emphasizing the importance of social factors. Recent research has revealed that social-psychological and sociological factors are imperative to knowledge sharing. The theory of reasoned action (TRA) was designed to model how any specified behavior under volitional control is produced by beliefs, attitudes, and intentions towards that behavior. Organizational justice encompasses three dimensions: interactive, procedural, and distributive justice. This study explores knowledge sharing through the lens of organizational justice by empirically testing a model that combined elements from the Theory of Reasoned Action and the Organizational Justice Theory. The study findings show that attitude toward knowledge sharing, subjective norm, and procedural justice have a direct impact on the intention to share knowledge, while distributive and interactional justice influence it indirectly via attitude toward knowledge sharing. Implications for both theory and practice are discussed.