Knowledge-sharing attitude and behavior of civil servants: motivations behind rewards

Abstract

PurposeTo a large extent, knowledge in government workplaces resides within the hierarchy as it provides unique services to the public. Governments should preserve and pass on valuable and irreplaceable knowledge in providing their services through learning by sharing. Yet, sharing requires time and effort. This study examines the motivations of civil servants to share knowledge and their knowledge-sharing behaviors.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted an online survey to collect quantitative data from civil servants in the Hong Kong Government and obtained 104 useable responses to test the eight hypotheses comprising six constructs by structural equation modeling to explore the participants' knowledge-sharing behaviors.FindingsResults indicated that (1) expected contribution was the primary source of motivation behind knowledge sharing; (2) participants engaged more frequently in informal than formal knowledge-sharing activities; and (3) there was a dire need for knowledge sharing focusing on explicit knowledge of work procedures.Originality/valueThe research focuses on motivational factors for knowledge sharing. Despite abundant literature about knowledge sharing in public or governmental organizations, scant studies focus on the motivations behind why expected rewards and expected associations have less significant impacts on the attitude toward knowledge sharing than expected contribution.

Editorial: Special selection on current bibliometrics and reviews

“…Results indicate that the research growth rate is expected to gradually increase and reveal countries and topics of research focus. Readers may be interested in reading recent articles on curriculum development for the Master of Public Administration (Ho et al, 2023a), urban governance (Zhang et al, 2023), IoT as a societal transformer (Chohan et al, 2023), open government data (Dai et al, 2023;Wu et al, 2022;Wang et al, 2023c) and knowledge management in governments (Lam et al, 2023). Khan et al (2024a) performed a systematic review and found a significant impact of information creditability on the information adoption behavior of social media users.…”