Departmental Boundaries and Knowledge Sharing in Corporate Online Communities

An increasing number of companies are launching corporate online communities to facilitate knowledge sharing. A corporate online community is different from traditional communication channels, as its social-media atmosphere physically eliminates organizational boundaries. However, studies have shown that organizational boundaries still hinder knowledge exchange in corporate online communities. In this study, we propose that both knowledge-focused and social-related motivations exist, underlying the impact of organizational boundaries on knowledge sharing, and the former is not necessarily detrimental. We focus on the departmental boundaries and propose that employees are more inclined to share knowledge with the same-department colleagues (i.e., intradepartmental knowledge-sharing inclination). Using the data set of a large corporate question-and-answer (Q&A) community, we first demonstrate the existence of intradepartmental knowledge-sharing inclination with a potential-dyads approach and a series of robustness checks. We further apply an empirical design using the same-name feature to strengthen the identification. Our mechanism checks provide evidence of the existence of both knowledge-focused and social-related motivations underlying this inclination. Although the proposed two types of motivations also exist for the knowledge-sharing inclinations subject to other organizational boundaries (e.g., location boundaries), the intradepartmental knowledge-sharing inclination is unique because it is driven more by the knowledge-focused motivations (versus social-related motivations). This emphasis on knowledge-focused motivations should not necessarily hinder the knowledge exchange, and our analyses verify that the intradepartmental knowledge-sharing inclination is not detrimental in terms of work performance or effort in knowledge input.

History: Juan Feng, Senior Editor; Chad Ho, Associate Editor.

Funding: Y. Liu acknowledges the support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 72201083] and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Provincial Universities of Zhejiang [Grant GK229909299001-220]. Y. Chen acknowledges the support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China Key Project [Grant 72432008]. H. K. Cheng gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the John B. Higdon Eminent Scholar endowed chair.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2023.0086.