Culture and Trust in Fostering Knowledge-Sharing

In this competitive age, knowledge is continuously being identified by both scholars and practitioners as the most competitive asset. Numerous organisations in today’s knowledge-intensive economy are keen not only to determine knowledge-sharing but to also introduce strategies to adopt as well as implement knowledge management (KM) so that knowledge coming from workers are transformed into organisational knowledge. In spite of this, businesses find it a challenge to leverage knowledge due to their workers’ intentional and unintentional practice of knowledge hoarding. For that reason, the purpose of this paper is to further understand and explore the co-existence of two influential elements in knowledge sharing, namely, ‘culture’ and ‘trust’ in inculcating a culture that shares. A review of literature managed to highlight and examined the need for organisations to extend a deeper understanding of the interactions between these two elements, which are often regarded as crucial factors that supports the tradition to share knowledge (both tacit and explicit) originating from organisations’ valuable assets workers. The paper discusses and reveals ‘sociability’ and ‘solidarity’ with the different essentials of culture as well as elaborating on ‘benevolence trust’ and ‘competence trust’ that facilitate sharing. At the same time, this paper had further investigated the main pre-conditions to foster knowledgesharing in a culture of organisations, which identifies the levels of trust and solidarity in explaining the four types of cultures i.e. networked, communal, fragmented, and mercenary.