Preventing Free-Ride Phenomenon in Team Knowledge Sharing Based on Secondary Principal-Agent Model

In the increasing keen market competition, knowledge capital is gradually becoming important resource. Knowledge sharing can make organizational knowledge freely flow in definite range and save the cost of knowledge acquisition to enhance knowledge productivity and benefit for knowledge application and innovation. The difficulty in knowledge sharing is how to avoid free-ride phenomenon. The purpose of this paper is to solve free-ride problem in team knowledge sharing through setting secondary principal method. In this paper, we firstly analyze the cause of free-ride phenomenon and the key to solving the problem in team knowledge sharing. The free-ride phenomenon depends on the characteristics of business organization, both inside and outside environment of organization and the characteristics of knowledge. The key solution to this problem lies in how to design incentive coefficient. By setting the secondary principals (supervisors), the manager can strengthen the supervision management of team, assess effectively personal contribution of every team member and give corresponding fair return to each member. Thus it can make that the optimal choice of each employee in team is sharing knowledge actively. On the basis of secondary principal-agent model, we discuss the team scale further. The paper supplies theoretical basis and practical guide to promote staff knowledge sharing performance for enterprise manager.