The Influence of Individual and Group Motivation on Individual’s Knowledge Contribution Intention

To study the knowledge sharing in team settings is getting more and more important in the modern organizations. Individual work model is being given up in favor of the teamwork, such as R&D teams, project teams, and so on. A team could integrate the knowledge distributed by its team members. Therefore, studying the knowledge sharing in the team settings will become the most important issue. The objective of this study is to deepen our understanding about how to influence a group member’s tendencies toward the engagement in the knowledge contribution behavior in the team setting. Specifically, we have investigated the effects on individual motivation (i.e. reputation, reciprocity, altruism and knowledge self-efficacy) and group motivation (i.e. group collaborative norm, group trust and group identification) on the individual’s knowledge contribution intention (i.e. tacit and explicit intention) in the teamwork.Data collected from 190 students taking a project research course at a large university in Central Taiwan. The results indicate that (1) reputation and reciprocity has no significant effects on the knowledge contribution intention (including both the tacit and explicit knowledge); (2) altruism and knowledge self-efficacy have significant effects on the knowledge contribution intention (including both the tacit and explicit knowledge); (3) group collaborative norm has significant effects on the knowledge contribution intention (including both the tacit and explicit knowledge); (4) group trust and group identification have significant effects on the explicit knowledge contribution intention, but both of them do not have any effect on the tacit knowledge contribution intention. This study has also revealed the implications between the researchers and the practitioners as well.