What One Feels and What One Knows: the Influence of Emotions on Attitudes and Intentions towards Knowledge Sharing

This paper provides theoretical and empirical insight in the relationship between emotions and knowledge sharing. Pride (an ego-focused emotion) and empathy (an other-focused emotion) are related to eagerness and willingness to share knowledge. Our hypotheses were tested by means of a survey in which respondents were asked to evaluate one of four different scenarios. Pride and empathy were found to affect eagerness and willingness to share knowledge. Furthermore, these emotions also influenced knowledge sharing intentions, partly mediated by eagerness and willingness. Both eagerness and willingness mediate the relationship between pride and knowledge sharing intention, whereas only willingness turned out to mediate the relationship between empathy and knowledge sharing. These findings have a number of implications for theory on both knowledge sharing and emotions.