The Impact of Organizational Culture and Knowledge-Sharing - Exploitation and Exploration on Individual Creativity

This paper addresses the understudied issue of how individually-held expertise in the information systems proposal teams of systems integration companies results in creativity during the proposal process. It proposes a new model of individual creativity, divided into five parts: Organizational culture, knowledge-sharing, exploration, exploitation, and individual creativity. We assume that organizational culture and knowledge-sharing may positively affect individual creativity, through the mediating effects of exploration and exploitation. To develop our hypotheses, we reflect on the difference between exploration and exploitation by adding the moderating effects of individual knowledge, with two segregated groups (high- and low-level). Empirical results reveal that (1) organizational culture and knowledge-sharing influence exploitation, while individual level of knowledge differs significantly between groups; and (2) organizational culture has a significant influence on exploration in groups with high levels of individual knowledge, while knowledge-sharing affects exploration more profoundly in groups with low levels of individual knowledge.