Knowledge leakage, an Achilles’ heel of knowledge sharing

Abstract

In today's knowledge-based economy, organizations are progressively accumulating the knowledge, which they required for innovation, from outside their boundaries. Having accepted the important role of knowledge sharing in innovation performance, it is disappointing to note that the potential harmful impacts of accidental and intentional knowledge leakage on this relationship are still neglected or undeveloped in the literature. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the impact of knowledge sharing and entrepreneurial orientation on organization's innovation performance, considering intentional and accidental leakage of knowledge. Data were collected using a structured questionnaire from 151 manufacturing SMEs operating in Malaysia, listed in Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers (FMM) directory of 2017. Purposive sampling technique was used in this study and data were analyzed using partial least squares technique. The findings of this study show that there is a positive and significant relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and knowledge sharing (R 2 = 0.140). Moreover, knowledge sharing and entrepreneurial orientation have a positive and significant effect on innovation performance (R 2 = 0.500). In addition, the results show that accidental knowledge leakage negatively moderates the relationship between knowledge sharing and innovation performance. However, accidental knowledge leakage has no moderating effect in the same relationship. This research is important due to the increasing complexity and the networked nature of innovation and high risk of knowledge leakage in this environment. The findings of this study contribute to the understanding of the potentially positive and negative issues related to entrepreneurial orientation, knowledge sharing, innovation performance, and knowledge leakage, which have thus far remained empirically under-researched.

Effect of intellectual capital and entrepreneurial orientation on innovation performance of manufacturing SMEs: mediating role of knowledge sharing

“…This study shows that EO has no positive impact on knowledge sharing, which in contrast to a previous study by Vafaei-Zadeh et al (2019). This might be due to the nature of the sampled industries.…”

“…It is also shown that knowledge sharing has a robust and positive impact on innovation performance, consistent with the literature (Soto-Acosta et al , 2017; Vafaei-Zadeh et al , 2019; Wang and Hu, 2020; Zhao et al , 2021). These results indicate that knowledge sharing is accepted in manufacturing SMEs and they give value to it and consider it as a beneficial practice.…”

“…Entrepreneurial orientation was measured using seven items adapted from De Clercq et al (2015). There were also nine measurement items adapted from Vafaei-Zadeh et al (2019) for knowledge sharing. Lastly, the innovation performance was measured using three items adapted from Vafaei-Zadeh et al (2019).…”

“…Based on the fact that knowledge transfer/sharing does not take place in SMEs, yielding in turn lack of innovative capabilities. This is why knowledge sharing is important for the entire organization to learn new approaches, solve issues, create core competencies and initiate new actions or contingencies (Vafaei-Zadeh et al , 2019). Knowledge sharing is also essential in collaborative innovation from the knowledge exchange point of view.…”

Understanding the determinants of e-wallet continuance usage intention in Malaysia

“…In addition, all the CR values are higher than 0.70, thereby confirming the convergent validity of the measures (Table 3 ). Table 4 displays heterotrait-monotrait ratio of correlations (HTMT .85 ) values below 0.85 thus the acceptable discriminant validity of the measurement model is therefore achieved (Henseler et al 2015 ; Vafaei-Zadeh et al 2019a ).…”