Self-efficacy and Individual Knowledge Sharing

Firms must compete in the world economy with superior knowledge. The ability to disperse that knowledge throughout the firm should be a primary consideration. An important question for managers is how to focus on the economic and social-psychological factors that affect knowledge sharing. Knowledge sharing is dependent on individual cognitions, which is one of the most complex task forms. Self-efficacy is an ideal theory to understand why people choose to share knowledge in some contexts and not in others. We propose three kinds of self-efficacy: knowledge self-efficacy, knowledge creation self-efficacy and ICT self-efficacy, and analysis how they affect the intentions and behaviors of knowledge sharing. On this basis, we propose the specific suggestions of how to build and raise individual self-efficacy of knowledge sharing by referencing the classical theory of self-efficacy.