Knowledge sharing on online platforms within organizations: An interactionist perspective on generalized exchange

Organisations are increasingly introducing online platforms to facilitate knowledge sharing among employees across organisational boundaries. Nonetheless, individuals do not always share knowledge on such platforms. This study aims to identify the factors that can motivate individuals to share knowledge on an online platform drawing on social exchange theory and the idea of generalised exchange, a form of social exchange identified on online knowledge-sharing platforms in previous studies. Specifically, we propose that individuals are more likely to share knowledge on online platforms when they have requests from an employee with whom they have worked in the same office in the past but do not currently work in the same office location (i.e. past-collocation history), have high levels of generalised exchange orientation, and need to use a wide variety of knowledge to complete their jobs (i.e. knowledge variety). Using a longitudinal dataset spanning 6 months among 100 users on an in-house online platform of a professional service firm, we find support for the three-way interaction hypothesis in a three-level analysis. We discuss implications on knowledge sharing on in-house online platforms.