FACTORS INFLUENCING KNOWLEDGE SHARING TOWARDS QUALITY AND INNOVATION
Abstract:
The purposes of this research were to identify the factors that had an influence on knowledge sharing of employees in herbal industry in Thailand and explain their relationships in order to improve quality and innovation. The theory of planned behavior (TPB) was used as a basis in predicting and explaining the employee’s behavior. Furthermore, other five relevant factors were derived from reviewing earlier relevant literature. The questionnaires were used as a data collecting tool. The data were analyzed by the quantitative method which included the descriptive statistical method, and structural equation modeling technique. Finally, the research model was evaluated by the expertise oriented evaluation technique, and had trailed as case study. The results of this research, firstly, the derived factors that influencing knowledge sharing of employees were including; leadership, trust, organizational culture, information technology, and motivation. Next, based on TPB, all individual factors, attitude toward knowledge sharing, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control had the influence on intention to share knowledge and knowledge sharing behavior’s employees. Furthermore, the information technology had the highest influence on knowledge sharing of employees, and then, trust, organizational culture, motivation, and leadership, respectively. The contribution of this research, the herbal industry could focus on the factors influencing knowledge sharing in order to manage their policies and improve their organization towards quality and innovation.
Keywords: Knowledge sharing, Influencing factors, Innovation, Herbal industry
INTRODUCTION
Since 2003, Thai government had set a 5-year plan (2004-2008) to transform itself into a global leading country as “Thailand: Centre of Excellent Health Care of Asia” or a medical hub of Asia. This plan focused on three main areas of healthcare; medical services, healthcare services, and Thai herbal products. At that time, there were more than 1.2 million international patients annually and could generated the revenue about USD 37.5 billion (Lunt, Horsfall, & Hanefeld, 2015). Thailand quickly became the well-known medical tourism destination.
Nowadays, the healthcare paradigm has shift from cure to prevention. The wellness tourism has emerged and focuses on prevent the illness rather than treatment. It can be said that the tourists of wellness tourism are the healthy persons. Wellness tourism is growing faster than other tourism industry. There are 289 million active wellness consumers in the world’s top 30 industrialized nations alone (SRI International, 2010). In 2013 it can generate the revenue about $494 billion global tourism industry, about 14.6% of all tourism spending (SRI International, 2013). Moreover, it can generate about 14.5 million jobs around the world. Thailand also recognizes and is on the alert for wellness tourism.
In 2012 Thai government had set the second strategic plan (2012-2016) to develop Thailand into an ‘International Health Center for Excellence’. This plan focuses on four main areas which include medical services, integrative wellness centers, development of Thai herbs, and traditional and alternative Thai medicines (BOI, 2014). Currently, Thailand becomes the top rank of wellness tourism destination from the evaluation of various sources such as magazine and website. Each year there are approximately 7,000,000 wellness tourists around the world. This could generate 40,000 million U.S. dollars or approximately 1.24 trillion Baht. Moreover, about 1,200,000 tourists from this group prefer Thailand as the first destination (Patients beyond Borders, 2013).
Herbal industry in Thailand is an important industry that supports the wellness tourism. It offers various kinds of wellness products such as herbal medicines, cosmetics, herb extractions, spa products, and food. The herbal product industry in Thailand has been awakened to create and development of new products in order to fulfill the customer needs. At this moment, most herbal companies in Thai herbal industry are relatively small and medium enterprises (SME). Nevertheless, those companies still have a huge potential to continuous grow, if they can improve their innovative products. However, they still face many restrictions such as the lacking of product standards such as Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP), and the Food and Drug Agency (FDA), lacking of skills and knowledge, low quality of products, law restrictions such as commercial tax, and registration of trade secret or patent, inadequate qualified workers, and ineffective production system.
The innovative products are the valuable asset to herbal industry. In the product development process of herbal industry, sometimes it takes such as a long development cycle, and a high costs and risks in the R&D process. To reduce time to market is a majority goal of herbal industry. The creation of innovative products requires the process of knowledge creation. The knowledge sharing through interactions among individuals is a process that could stimulate the process of knowledge creation and may be able to increase their innovative performance to reduce time to market. However, from reviewing the previous literature, the herbal industry in Thailand had an ineffective knowledge sharing system.
From all mentioned above, this research aims to identify the factors that influence knowledge sharing in herbal industry in Thailand and to explain the relationships among factors influencing knowledge sharing in herbal industry.
LITERATURE REVIEW AND HYPOTHESIS
Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB)
The concept of the theory of planned behavior (TPB) was proposed by Ajzen in 1988. The purpose of TPB is mainly to explain and predict human behavior. The variables of TPB model can divide into two types as shown in Figure 8. First, the main dependent variables consist of behavioral intention and actual behavior. Second, the main independent variables of TPB model, which are the causes of behavioral intention and behavior, consist of attitude towards behavior, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control. Ajzen, I. (1991) identified the definitions of those variables as following; 1) Attitude toward behavior: refers to the degree to which a person has a favorable or unfavorable evaluation or appraisal of the behavior in question, 2) Subjective norms: refers to the perceived social pressure to perform or not to perform the behavior, 3) Perceived behavioral control: refers to the perceived ease or difficulty of performing the behavior and it is assumed to reflect past experience as well as anticipated impediments and obstacles.
The TPB has been used to predict and explain a various areas of human behaviors research. The TPB has also been used to explain knowledge sharing behavior in various states such education, business, healthcare, and technology (Alhalhouli, Hasan, & Der, 2014; George, 2004; J. Lee, Cerreto, & Lee, 2010; Ryu, Ho, & Han, 2003; Schifter & Ajzen, 1985; Venkatesh, Morris, & Ackerman, 2000). In the knowledge sharing researches, several researches found that all three factors; attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control had positively effected on the person’s intention and knowledge sharing behaviour. The perceived behavioural control often referred to the concept of Bandura (1982) that could lead the person’s intention and knowledge sharing behaviour.
Therefore, five research hypotheses were constructed based on TPB following these;
H1: Attitude toward knowledge sharing has an influence on intention to share knowledge.
H2: Subjective norm has an influence on intention to share knowledge.
H3: Perceived behavioural control has an influence on intention to share knowledge.
H4: Perceived behavioural control has an influence on knowledge sharing behaviour.
H5: Intention to share knowledge has an influence on knowledge sharing behaviour.
Furthermore, according to Ajzen, I. (1991), to more explain the variance of human behavior, TPB may add more relevant factors. Then, from reviewing relevant literature, the academic papers which concerned with the factors influencing knowledge sharing were chosen. Five factors which had most studied, were chosen and studied in this research. There were leadership, organization culture, trust, and motivation and information technology. All factors and their hypotheses will be explained as following;
Information Technology
Nowadays, information technology plays an important role that has a lot of benefits to the organization such as enhancing the competitiveness and organizational performance (Bharadwaj, 2000; Croteau & Bergeron, 2001; Porter, 1985). The role of information technology in an organization includes controlling and storing data, learning and development. Moreover, the use of information technology to increase communication among members in an organization could also enhance knowledge sharing within organization (Robey, Boudreau, & Rose, 2000). This could lead to formal and informal knowledge sharing activities. In addition, much earlier literature focused on information technology as a driven tool in sharing knowledge among individual such as the use of network connection (Aulawi, Sudirman, Suryadi, & Govindaraju, 2008; Hsu, 2006). While, some literature focused on that the knowledge on information technology was also an important factor that could lead to knowledge sharing behaviour (Davison, Ou, & Martinsons, 2013; M. B. Ismail & Yusof, 2010). Therefore, the research hypotheses were constructed as following;
H6: Information technology has an influence on intention to share knowledge.
H7: Information technology has an influence on knowledge sharing behaviour.
Trust
Trust is an intangible factor that has been referred in much behavioral researches and also knowledge management literature. Trust is defined as “a willingness of a party to be vulnerable” (Mayer et all, 1995, p. 712). Trust is an essential organization factor, especially relating to interpersonal exchanges and relationships. Furthermore, earlier literature, trust can categorized into many types such as personal trust and impersonal trust (Morris & Moberg, 1994), conditional and unconditional trust (Jones & George, 1998), and interpersonal trust and institutional trust (Höhmann & Welter, 2005). In knowledge sharing researches, trust in much earlier researches played an important role as mediating or antecedent of knowledge sharing. The high levels of trust would lead to knowledge sharing among individuals within organization (AbramsLC, 2003; Holste & Fields, 2010; Matheus, Cloonan, & Selini, 2008; Panteli & Sockalingam, 2005). Moreover, trust would be the mediated factor that leads to knowledge sharing (Cheng, Yeh, & Tu, 2008). Therefore, the research hypotheses were constructed as following;
H8: Trust has an influence on intention to share knowledge.
H9: Trust has an influence on knowledge sharing behaviour.
Leadership
Many decades ago, much has been researched on the theory of leadership with the purpose of developing the organization. The roles of the leader include such planning, hiring, motivating, and rewarding employees. However, the role of leadership does not only involve managing the organization but also encouraging, facilitating, and sustaining the innovation and learning (Yukl, 2009).Leadership is an essential factor in the success or failure of organizations (Bass, 1990). Many researches agreed that the roles of leadership influenced on knowledge sharing could improve the quality and organization performance (Howell & Annansingh, 2013; N. A. M. Ismail, Welch, & Xu, 2015; Seba, Rowley, & Lambert, 2012). For example, N. A. M. Ismail et al. (2015) mentioned that sharing knowledge among academics could improve the quality of university research and creating credible leadership influenced on sharing knowledge as well. In addition, P. Lee, Gillespie, Mann, and Wearing (2010) stated that leadership was the strongest factor influencing on attitudes towards knowledge sharing and intention to share knowledge. Therefore, the research hypotheses were constructed as following;
H10: Leadership has an influence on intention to share knowledge.
H11: Leadership has an influence on knowledge sharing behaviour.
Organization Culture
As Drucker (1999) mentioned, the management system is concerned with people, culture, and performance. One challenge of organizational development is organizational culture. Schein (1992, p. 12), who is an expert in this field, defined organizational culture as “a pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way you perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems”. The strong organizational culture will lead to improving innovation, supporting teamwork, and increasing efficiency, quality, and productivity, while a weak organization culture could block the creating of new ideas, processes, and systems (Morgan, 1989). Furthermore, organization culture is an important organizational factor that influence on knowledge sharing behavior’s employee(Alhalhouli et al., 2014; Du, Ai, & Ren, 2007; Supar, Ibrahim, Mohamed, Yahya, & Abdul, 2005). For example, Möller and Svahn (2003) indicated that an ethnic culture had positively influenced on knowledge sharing in the different type of intercultural business. Karlsen and Gottschalk (2004) conducted a survey research in factors effecting knowledge sharing in information technology (IT) projects. The results showed that the information technology, systems and procedures, and culture had effected to the knowledge sharing. Therefore, the research hypothesis was constructed as following;
H12: Organization culture has an influence on intention to share knowledge.
H13: Organization culture has an influence on knowledge sharing behaviour.
Motivation
Motivation is an important role of the organization’s manager: “Motivation is the set of forces that leads people to behave in particular ways” (Griffin, R. W. and G. Moorhead, 2009). The theories of motivation were established by many theorist and researchers, for example, Maslow’s hierarchy, and Herzberg’s dual-structure theory. Motivation often categorized into two main types which are intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Intrinsic motivation defines as ‘the doing of an activity for its inherent satisfactions rather than for some separable consequence, while extrinsic motivation defines as ‘a construct that pertains whenever an activity is done in order to attain some separable outcome.’ such as money reward, prize, and trophies (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Many prior research papers indicated that both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations could increase the knowledge sharing among individual. (Baharim, 2008; Cameron, 2006; Chris Zhao & Zhu, 2014; Lam & Lambermont-Ford, 2010; W. T. Wang, 2015) For example, Bartol and Srivastava (2002) claimed that the monetary reward as the motivation could lead to team knowledge sharing within organization. Furthermore, Mohammed Fathi, Cyril Eze, and Guan Gan Goh (2011) indicated that the employees who were joyful at work would more willingness to share their knowledge and experiences with their colleagues. Therefore, the research hypotheses were constructed as following;
H14: Motivation has an influence on intention to share knowledge.
H15: Motivation has an influence on knowledge sharing behaviour.
MEDTHOD
Sample and Procedure
In this research, the data were obtained through a structured questionnaire. The herbal manufacturers who are located in Thailand were chosen as the sample of this study. These consisted of the herbal medicine manufacturers, the herbal cosmetic manufacturers, the herbal food and supplement manufacturers, the herbal spa manufacturers, and other herbal product manufacturers. Total 224 questionnaires were chosen in analysing step.