Social-Psychological Factors and Knowledge Sharing During Product Development: A Study in India

In this study, we examined relationships between social-psychological factors(SPFs) and knowledge sharing between individuals during product development (PD). More specifically, we examined the influence of three SPFs from the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) - attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioural control - upon individual knowledge sharing, during PD work. We characterized knowledge sharing two-fold as: codification and personalisation. We then used data from a sample of 284 individuals across 19 PD units of Indian manufacturing organisations to test hypotheses relating the SPFs to knowledge sharing behaviour. A key finding of this study is that attitude does not have a significant association with knowledge sharing but both subjective norm and perceived behavioural control do. The study draws attention to the idea that PD managers must pay careful attention to social-psychological aspects of individuals when they design knowledge management initiatives to improve performance. Future studies can also examine the same question with larger samples and across multiple contexts. A distinct feature of our study is the use of the TPB to study these relationships in the PD context.