Why would you save your files in a group folder?—Motivations for information sharing through digital repositories in project groups

• Main Author: Huang, Meikuan
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01.01.2007
• Subjects: Alliances; Behavior; Collaboration; Communication; Communication channels; Competitive advantage; Cooperation; Corporate culture; Decision making; Design; Employees; Group dynamics; Hypotheses; Influence; Information management; Information processing; Information retrieval; Information science; Information sharing; Information storage; Knowledge management; Management; Memory; Motivation; Online data bases; Problem solving; Research methodology; Science; Social networks; Social sciences; Studies; Teams; Telescopes
• ISBN: 9780549340638; 0549340637

While knowledge management research is gaining in popularity in various disciplines such as organizational behavior, communication, and information science, insufficient attention has been paid to work group members' motivation to share information through digital repositories. The goal of this study is to understand various factors associated with information sharing through digital repositories in small groups. To meet this goal, this study integrates explanations from six social-psychological and communication theories into a streamlined model based on the Multi-theoretical Multi-level (MTML) framework (Monge & Contractor, 2003). Further, this study demonstrates that contextual factors in work groups may contribute to information sharing above and beyond individual level social-psychological factors. This study proposes a refined model (MTML 2.0) to advance the MTML based model by integrating four group contextual factors: trust, task interdependence, management expectation, and group norms. This study also describes an empirical research and specifies the sample, procedures, and instrumentation. The findings in this study provide an example of the usefulness and complexity of the MTML theoretical models and social network analysis for small group knowledge management research. Moreover, the MTML 2.0 model proposed in this study has well complemented and extended the MTML based model by revealing important nuances beyond what was found by MTML model alone, and therefore MTML 2.0 has the potential to extend the multi-level dimension originally discussed in MTML and shed light on the interactive dynamics of various levels of analysis. The major theoretical contributions of this study are: (i) extending research on knowledge networks by incorporation of non-human agents, adaptation of theories that were previously applied only to human-to-human context to human-to-non-human interaction context, and applying the MTML perspective to the explanation of knowledge allocation behaviors; (ii) explicating the nuances of explanatory power of multiple theories in a model, by taking into account the influence of organizational context. The main practical contributions are: (i) to help small groups design digital repositories so as to achieve their potential as shared resources; (ii) to help the management proactively design and implement desirable combinations of contextual factors in order to facilitate information sharing.