How Human Resource Practices Impact Knowledge Sharing in R&D Teams

Within organizations, employees create, accumulate, and share knowledge, often within teams. To increase team effectiveness, today´s organizations seek to promote knowledge sharing among their employees. Previous studies of knowledge sharing within organizations have ignored a critical factor: human resource management (HRM). To address this oversight, we recruited 172 research-and-development (R&D) teams (made up of 860 individuals) to participate in a study of the relationship between HRM and the willingness of team members to share knowledge. Fifty-two sets of completed questionnaires from 203 employees formed the basis of our empirical analysis. We classified team members according to their work values and focused on exploring whether the HRM of teams with different work values would differentially impact knowledge sharing. We discuss our findings in terms of their implications for management practices and future research.