Exploring the Factors that Influence Academics' Knowledge Sharing Behaviour in a Saudi, gender segregated Environment

Abstract

Knowledge sharing is critical to businesses and a core activity of Higher Education Institutions. What encourages or discourages women to share knowledge, and how the factors that matter differ from those affecting men’s behaviours, is not well understood.

There is limited understanding of how the gender-segregated campus structure in Saudi universities influences knowledge-sharing practices among women and men. Therefore, this thesis explores the factors, individual, organisational and technological, that promote or inhibit knowledge sharing between the staff of one such Saudi university. The findings address how strongly and in what direction each factor influences knowledge sharing, on each gender and both combined, framed by prevailing social psychology theories and contextualised by what we already know.

The research uses a mixed methods approach for data collection and analysis. Quantitative data was obtained by a structured questionnaire, completed by a sample of female and male academic staff, and modelled using PLS-SEM. Qualitative results came from structured interviews, which provided deeper insight into the nuances of complex cultural and behavioural themes, in their natural context.

The research found that what most influenced women to share knowledge was IT applications, including social media sharing platforms, whereas self-efficacy most influenced the men. The biggest influence on them combined was University X’s organisational culture and climate. Almost all of the tested factors positively encouraged knowledge sharing, nine of fourteen significantly so, only extrinsic rewards had a small, inhibitory effect. Seven of the factors showed differences between men and women and six were stronger for women than men. Trust and social networks, for example, had no effect on academics’ intentions to share their knowledge with each other, but analysed separately, the women and men both showed that rewards do influence their knowledge sharing intentions. Academic Leadership impacted the intentions of male academics, while it had no impact on female academics and women and men combined were not impacted, consistent with the women.