Departmental Boundaries and Knowledge Sharing in Corporate Online Communities

Practice- and Policy-Oriented Abstract Can organizational boundaries still hinder knowledge-sharing in an online setting such as corporate online communities? Whereas the existing studies usually respond “yes” to the question, our study argues that this is not necessarily the case. We propose and empirically test two key motivations driving knowledge-sharing inclinations subjected to organizational boundaries, namely, knowledge-focused motivations and social-related motivations. Our analyses focus on departmental boundaries using data from a large corporate Q&A platform. We show a robust pattern: employees are more inclined to share knowledge within their departments (i.e., intradepartmental knowledge-sharing inclination). Notably, intradepartmental knowledge-sharing inclination is uniquely driven more by knowledge-focused motivations (versus social-related motivations). Managers should consider the revealed intradepartmental knowledge-sharing inclination when designing policies to promote knowledge sharing across departmental boundaries, and the focus should be on social-related motivations. Also, it is worth noting that intradepartmental knowledge-sharing inclination is also driven by knowledge-focused reasons, reflected by knowledge providers’ desire to share helpful knowledge, and the knowledge-focused mechanisms are not necessarily detrimental to knowledge sharing. Finally, it is reassuring that we do not find negative associations between intradepartmental knowledge sharing and individual material outcomes such as work performance and promotions.