Mediating Effects of Trust: Knowledge Sharing in a Large Professional Service Firm

Effective utilization of intellectual capital hinges on valuable information and knowledge being shared throughout the organization - knowledge of who to turn to for help, of best practices, of innovative solutions, or of lessons learned from less successful endeavours. However, many organizations face significant challenges in promoting effective information and knowledge sharing among employees and there is little evidence-based guidance from empirical research studies. Information and knowledge-sharing interactions are embedded in multifaceted social contexts, influenced by several different social and cognitive (human) factors. A better grasp of these complex factors is needed to help organizations build on past experiences, respond more efficiently to emerging problems, develop new ideas and insights, and avoid reinventing solutions or repeating prior mistakes. This paper extends the findings of a large empirical study of organizational knowledge sharing, which examined the interplay of several notable social and cognitive factors, including trust, shared language, shared vision, tie strength, homophily, and relationship length. Initial data analysis examined the direct, relative, and collective effects of social and cognitive factors on organizational knowledge sharing factors (Evans, 2012). The results showed co-worker trust as having the strongest statistical influence on each factor used to operationalize organizational knowledge sharing: willingness to share knowledge, willingness to use knowledge, and perceived receipt of useful information/knowledge (Evans, 2013). This paper presents the results of a secondary data analysis, which examines whether perceived trustworthiness in co-workers acts as a mediating variable between the previously mentioned social/cognitive variables and knowledge sharing factors. Data were collected from 275 knowledge workers (legal professionals and paralegals) engaged in shared legal project work, at one of Canada's largest multijurisdictional law firms. The nature of their work required a significant reliance on co-workers, across offices nationwide, for both explicit and tacit knowledge. The nature of projects allowed respondents to objectively evaluate the outcomes, gaining a better sense of the perceived effects of knowledge shared. A method outlined by Baron and Kenny (1986), which includes hierarchical multiple regression analysis, was used to test for the mediating effect of trust. This study is one of only few to measure the role trust plays in mediating the relationship between different social/cognitive factors and knowledge sharing. Previous studies have examined this effect with far fewer factors, or with a much less inclusive conceptualization of knowledge sharing. The results show that, when perceived trustworthiness was high in the referent co-worker, there was less need for the respondent and the co-worker to have a shared vision. Alternatively, when there was less trust between co-workers, shared vision was required for them to participate in effective knowledge sharing. Trust also had a mediating effect between shared language and knowledge sharing, but only in relationships between respondents and co-workers they felt they worked well with.