The influence of collectivism, social orientation achievement motivation, and affective trust in subordinates on the intention of supervisors to share knowledge with their subordinates

Individual knowledge collectively contributes to the organization’s knowledge bank, and the creation, transfer and sharing of knowledge which is valuable, rare, inimitable and non-substitutable within an organization is the basis of organizational competitive advantage. Downward knowledge sharing from supervisor to subordinate could be a means to improve the knowledge level of the workforce and in turn can enhance the competency of subordinates, ultimately leading to the organization's competitive advantage. Understanding the influence of factors such as the collectivism, social orientation achievement motivation and affective trust towards subordinates on the intention to share knowledge with subordinates and sharing knowledge with subordinates will add value to the literature on knowledge sharing. The research question of this study is how do collectivism, social orientation achievement motivation and trust influence the intention of supervisors to share knowledge with their subordinates and their knowledge sharing with subordinate? This study employed a hypothesis-testing quantitative method with a cross-sectional design. The unit of analysis is individual members of the Malaysian Institute of Chemistry who hold supervisory positions in their respective organizations based in Malaysia. This study found that affective trust moderates the relationship between social orientation achievement motivation and intention to share knowledge with subordinates. Specifically, the strength of the positive relationship between social orientation achievement motivation and intention to share knowledge increases as affective trust increases. The relationship between collectivism and intention to share knowledge with subordinates was found to be mediated by social orientation achievement motivation only for supervisors with relatively higher affective trust in subordinates, for both explicit and implicit knowledge. These findings indicate that affective trust is a critical determinant of knowledge sharing.