Department of Management & Organisation

A short report from Gao Xiangyu on his Research Findings presented in the conference.

The picture was taken at 25rd Society for Industrial and Organisational Psychology (SIOP) Conference

In recent years, knowledge sharing among employees has received considerable amount of attention among organisational scholars. Although previous literatures provided remarkable insights on the role of interpersonal relationship in the process of knowledge transfer, all of them adopted a culture-free perspective which may neglect the difference of mechanism of interpersonal interaction across different cultural contexts.

In a recent paper presented at the 25th SIOP Conference Atlanta, United States, I developed and tested a model examining the relationship between guanxi, a Chinese indigenous concept, and effectiveness of knowledge transfer among employees. Specifically, this study found that high guanxi quality facilitates knowledge transfer among employees through incubating interpersonal benevolence-based trust and competence-based trust. In addition, when the transferred knowledge is tacit, complicated, and uncodifiable, high quality of guanxi and strong trust in co-workers’ competence are indispensable. Our findings justified the necessity of fostering professional trust among employees for effective knowledge sharing and organisational learning.