Knowledge leakage through social networks: a review of existing gaps, strategies for mitigating potential risk factors and future research direction

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to systematically review the literature on knowledge leakage through social networks in the past decade to find existing gaps, identify potential risk factors while, ultimately, proposing ways of mitigating these factors. Design/methodology/approach This study adopted Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analysis as guide for searching relevant scholarly publications. Subject-specific and -related research papers were obtained from three databases, namely, Scopus, Web of Science and EBSCOhost. The review data was generated from the search results while adopting specific criteria to either accept or reject a particular publication during the search process. Findings Technological, operational and human knowledge factors are some of the risks resulting from knowledge leakage. Highlights of the paper include strategies for mitigating these factors, including continuous training, creating awareness, banning social media usage at work and reinforcing nondisclosure policies. This study also found potential gaps from the literature, categorized as topical, geographical, industrial, theoretical, methodological and conceptual gaps while proposing ways of addressing these gaps using specific research questions. These questions set the direction for future studies on knowledge leakage and social networks. Originality/value Implications of the findings are laid out, particularly the idea of developing actionable managerial plans for preventing knowledge leakage from occurring in organizations in the first place. The systematic, rigorous, transparent and methodological procedures used throughout the entire research process strongly suggest that the findings and conclusions are legitimate. While the findings were not drawn arbitrarily, they potentially offer windows of opportunities for bridging the six potential gaps identified in this paper.

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“…Consequently, future studies should continue to analyze the presence of other types of opportunistic behavior, such as knowledge leakage (Timiyo and Foli, 2023). For instance, it would be interesting to determine whether the insights generated by BAC are falling into the wrong hands, assuming that employees could be deliberately or accidentally leaking them to external actors interested in exploiting such key information (Qiu and Haugland, 2019), which would have detrimental effects on OA.…”