Chapter 11: Work Motivation and Knowledge Sharing: The Roles of Team–Member Exchange (TMX), Justice Perceptions, Organizational Rules, and Climate for Trust

The question of how work motivation affects team members' tacit and explicit knowledge sharing has long puzzled organizational scholars. In this chapter, the quality of team–member exchange (TMX) is presented as one potential mechanism.

Key variables in the model are intrinsic and extrinsic work motivation, interactional and distributive organizational justice, tacit and explicit knowledge sharing, relationship-oriented and task-oriented TMX, organizational rules, organizational climate for trust. Separate models are developed for intrinsic versus tacit knowledge sharing.

While explicit knowledge sharing depends upon extrinsic factors such as extrinsic work motivation, task oriented TMX, distributive justice perceptions, and organizational rules, tacit knowledge sharing is dependent upon intrinsic factors such as intrinsic work motivation, relationship-oriented TMX, interactive justice perceptions, and perceptions of an organizational climate for trust.

This is the first model to provide a useful framework that should enable scholars to research the factors underlying the relationships between individual employee motivation and both explicit and tacit organizational knowledge sharing.