Social Value Identification and Knowledge Sharing

In an earlier post I noted the influence of organizational culture on knowledge sharing and the dimensions of organizational culture contributing to knowledge sharing behaviors. I later expanded on the managerial prompting and group identification dimensions. In this post, I will describe the third dimension of social value orientation.

Social value orientation is a personal attribute indicating a person's interaction with others. There are three profiles of social value orientation: competitors, individuals, and collectivists. Competitors seek to increase their return in order to maximize the distance between themselves and their competitors while individualists seek to maximize their own return regardless of the return of others. These two types are referred to as proself contributors. At the other end of the contribution spectrum are prosocial people with a social value orientation of collectivists. Collectivists are more interested in maximizing the group's return with less of a concern over their own personal return.

Since prosocial collectivist employees value the benefits of the group over their own benefits they are more likely to share knowledge than proself competitor and individualist employees who are more likely to hoard knowledge to improve their own benefits. Organizations employing or developing people with prosocial behaviors are more likely to see higher levels of knowledge sharing. While some employees may tend to be more competitive or individualist in their social value attributes, organizations emphasizing group value can influence proself workers to exhibit more prosocial social value behaviors and be more likely to contribute to sharing knowledge.