Sharing Knowledge on Workplace: What Factors Motivate Librarians to Share Their Knowledge?

The key feature in the development of any organization is knowledge sharing among its employees. There are various factors that motivate people to share their knowledge and managing its flow assists in its dissemination. The aim of this study is to investigate which intrinsic or extrinsic factors motivate librarians to share knowledge in the workplace. To be more specific, a research project was conducted in April 2008 which was based on a questionnaire instrument and semi-structured interviews. The participants were 34 librarians working in four academic and college libraries in Greece. The data collected were analyzed using the SPSS software. Apart from the descriptive statistics, a set of Spearman's correlations were used in order to check any connection between the values under research. The findings revealed that librarians appeared to value more intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation for sharing knowledge. The mean values showed that the main factors motivating librarians to share knowledge was the fact that it was important for them to do so (6.59) and because they could benefit from other colleagues, by sharing knowledge (6.35). Of less importance was the fact that it might help them get promoted (2.24). The Spearman's correlations were performed in order to test any relationship between any of the four general knowledge sharing attitudes and the factors of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. One example is that of the attitude "When I have knowledge that might be relevant for others in the library, I do what I can to make it available to them" and the intrinsic motivation factor "I enjoy doing so" (rs=0,479, N=34, p<0.01, two-tailed). The results of this study suggest that librarians acknowledge the importance of the role of intrinsic motivation in knowledge sharing and thatteam-based culture can benefit the success of knowledge sharing initiatives within libraries.