Abstract
A study examines empirically the interaction effects of national culture and contextual factors on employees' tendency to share knowledge with co-workers. Quantitative and open-ended responses to 2 scenarios were collected from 142 managers in the US and China. Consistent with culture-based expectation, the quantitative results indicated that Chinese versus US nationals' openness of knowledge sharing was related to their different degrees of collectivism - the relative emphasis on self versus collective interests - as well as whether knowledge sharing involved a conflict between self and collective interests. Also consistent with prediction, Chinese relative to US nationals shared knowledge significantly less with a potential recipient who was not a member of their ingroup. Content analysis of the open-ended responses further showed that the quantitative results are the aggregated outcomes of trade-offs across cultural attributes and their interactions with contextual factors.