Social Loafing in Distributed Organization: An Empirical Study

This study investigates how social loafing indirectly influences the knowledge sharing behavior in the context of IT-enabled distributed organization. In this high social loafing environment, we found the individual favor benefits may negatively moderate the relationship between economic and social strategies and knowledge contribution. This study provides some suggestions for the management of virtual organizations in supporting strategies design, knowledge contribution encouragement and member selection. & Hemingway, 2004; Ratcheva, 2003). Several studies have found that the availability of ICT is no guarantee of KS (Alavi & Leidner, 1999; Snowden, 2003; Takkinen, 2004). Some studies have found the “KS dilemma” to be even more salient in an IT-based environment (Breu & Hemingway, 2004). A considerable body of KS literature has adopted the framework of social exchange theory (SET) to understand people’s unwillingness to share knowledge in KMS. According to SET, one of most critical reasons for unwillingness to share knowledge is that people are not well motivated to share their knowledge (Hertel et al., 2005). Based on SET, people can be motivated by motivators such as social and economic factors (Kankanhalli et al., 2005; Lin, 2007). Since individuals’ motivations can be influenced by organizational interventions, some supporting strategies are considered to DOI: 10.4018/jabim.2011100105 International Journal of Asian Business and Information Management, 2(4), 44-60, October-December 2011 45 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. increase employees’ KS behavior (Kankanhalli et al., 2005). Numerous firms have applied economic reward systems in their KMS (Garud & Kumaraswamy, 2005), and some others apply social reward strategies. However, a review of the KS literature shows these supporting strategies affect employee KS behaviors, especially in the IT-based environment, at dissimilar levels (Bock & Kim, 2002; Bock et al., 2005). These supporting strategies are also interacted with individual differences (i.e., exchange orientation), and organizational context (social loafing level) (Cropanzano & Mitchell, 2005). From the perspective of social loafing theory (SLT), Redman et al. (2005) suggest that the interaction effect of individual difference and supporting strategies may be conditional upon the environment’s social loafing level. However, In the IT-based distributed environment, rare studies have examined the interaction effect of individual difference and supporting strategies on KS. It is still to be investigated whether some supporting strategies are effective or not in encouraging KS behavior in the IT-based environment with high social loafing level. This study tries to fill this gap that we investigate the supporting strategies-individual interactions on knowledge sharing in the high social loafing environment.