Examining the Influence of Cultural Values on the Routine Post-Adoptive Use of Knowledge Management Systems

This work-in-progress examines culture’s consequences on routine knowledge sharing behavior. It employs two complementary cross-cultural theories to develop an integrative model of culture and habitual system use in the context of knowledge management. More specifically, using the Theory of Basic Human Values and the Theory of IT-Culture Conflict, we posit that such cultural values as an emphasis on the legitimacy of an unequal distribution of resources, an emphasis on active mastery and change of the environment, and an emphasis on voluntary commitment to the welfare of others may, under certain conditions, lead to habitual knowledge management system use for contributing knowledge. In carefully selecting and integrating these two theories, this study overcomes major methodological problems inherent in much prior cross-cultural IS scholarship. We propose a quantitative methodology to test the model and discuss why structural equation modeling is the best-fitting data-analytic technique for quantitative cross-cultural IS research.