Employee commitment, knowledge sharing and knowledge integration: An empirical study of professional staffs in Chinese firms

Knowledge sharing and knowledge integration (KSI) is an important process in modern organizations, as successful KSI can result in shared and innovated intellectual capital, an increasingly important resource. This paper presents an empirical study, which examines the influences of employee commitment on KSI in the context of China. Considering the object of employee commitment can be any entity, and the characteristics of work-related environment of professional staffs, our research framework included employee commitment to occupation, organization, supervisor and co-worker besides KSI. Data collected from 949 auditors working in Chinese public accounting firms demonstrated that: employee commitment to occupation had a significant positive effect on their organizational commitment, supervisory commitment and co-worker commitment; and employee's organizational, supervisory and co-worker commitment had strongly positively influence on KSI; but employee's occupational commitment had only significantly influence on knowledge sharing, its effect on knowledge integration was not significant; namely, occupational commitment influenced on knowledge integration by the full-mediation of organizational commitment, supervisory commitment and co-worker commitment; moreover, knowledge sharing had a significantly positive impact on knowledge integration also. Based on these results, this paper concludes with a discussion of the implications and limitations of the research.