thesis_Daniela Noethen_print final - Jacobs University

Multilevel Investigation of Antecedents of Knowledge Sharing and Seeking in Teams
they found that an intrinsic motivation to learn predicted higher levels of knowledge seeking.
We extended these findings by demonstrating that intrinsic benefits expected from knowledge
transfer, too, have an effect on the frequency of seeking behavior, and that intrinsic
motivation has an equal influence on both transfer behaviors.
The influence of extrinsic benefits on knowledge transfer has been, as reported earlier, an
issue of ongoing debate in the extant literature, which might be due to the mixture of
knowledge transfer behaviors considered. In the present study, we demonstrate that extrinsic
benefits have a strong positive effect on seeking knowledge, whereas they have no significant
effect on knowledge sharing. However, since some of the studies that found positive effects
exclusively dealt with knowledge sharing (and not seeking) in IT settings (Constant et al.,
1996; Kankanhalli et al., 2005), this may only be one part of the story. If we consider
knowledge seeking, the effect of extrinsic benefits seems rather obvious: extrinsic benefits are
direct and, at least partly, lie in the knowledge that the seeker receives. Wasko and Faraj
(2000), for example, discovered in their qualitative study that people participate in
newsgroups mainly for the extrinsic benefits they expect to gain from this participation
(access to work-relevant knowledge that is only available there, solving problems, etc.). On
the other hand, for knowledge sharing, extrinsic benefits can only be expected if the transfer is
visible, especially for supervisors, and can be rewarded accordingly. This applies far more to
IT settings (e.g., contributing to an electronic knowledge repository), than for within-team
knowledge transfer which occurs between colleagues. This difference might explain why
sharing is sometimes affected by extrinsic benefits, and sometimes it is not. This question
certainly merits further investigation, for which making a distinction between sharing and
seeking knowledge seems to be worthwhile.
Over and above these individual-level effects of motivation, we did not find a contextual
effect of intrinsic motivation. Consequently, we have to assume that, again, it is rather the
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