Exploring the Effect of Incentive Factors on Knowledge Sharing and Product Innovation of Financial Services Industry in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Ya-PeiHou, 侯雅珮
• Other Authors: Wei-Tsong Wang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/79755624497399071688

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 資訊管理研究所 === 98 === In the knowledge-based economy, knowledge management has become a major focus of organizations. This task is particularly critical for organizations in knowledge-intensive industries, such as the financial services industry, where companies are facing the rapid development of information technologies, deregulation, and the trend of monetary integration. Therefore, performing effective knowledge management and innovation practices in order to equip managers with the capability to effectively respond to the changes in the business environment has become a key for organizations to remain competitive. However, knowledge is not symmetrically distributed within an organization. Thus, in order for an organization to maintain competitive advantages, facilitating knowledge sharing across units and fostering product innovation have become crucial tasks. However, effective knowledge sharing within an organization often faces obstacles, and thus, how to facilitate knowledge sharing behavior within an organization is worth studying in more depth. While most of the existing studies focus on exploring the factors fostering knowledge sharing at the organizational level in the context of the manufacturing industry and research and development sectors, very few of them are concerned with the financial services industry. Additionally, the role of individual factors, which are the key to causing barriers of knowledge sharing, tends to be overlooked in the existing studies. Consequently, this study aims to close the theoretical gap in the existing literature by examining the relationships among environmental and personal factors, knowledge sharing, and product innovation. A social cognitive theory (SCT)-based model, which includes knowledge sharing self-efficacy and outcome expectations for personal influences, and trust for environmental influence, is developed. Based on a survey of 371 employees from the financial services industry in Taiwan, this study applies structural equation modeling to investigate the proposed model. The results show that trust has both direct and indirect effects on knowledge sharing. The results also indicate that knowledge sharing self-efficacy has positive but insignificant effects on knowledge sharing, but it has indirect influences on knowledge sharing through two of outcome expectations. Thus, hard and soft rewards for outcome expectations have significant influence on knowledge sharing, but altruism does not. Finally, knowledge sharing has significant effects on product innovation. Overall, the proposed model based on SCT can help to foster individual knowledge sharing behavior, and validates the influence of knowledge sharing and product innovation.