Get Your Hands Out of My Drawers: A Survey of Information Ownership and Stewardship at the Air Force Institute of Technology

Despite beliefs in the benefits of good Information Resources Management (IRM) practices, executives still find their organizations plagued by outdated, inconsistent, and unavailable information. This information is often stored in disparate, standalone systems spread throughout the business. The Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) fails to reap the synergistic benefits of shared information despite its bounty of information systems and proclamations for IRM principles. Previous researcher postulated that this disconnect may be explained, in part, by an ownership attitude at the functional level. Empirical evidence gathered from a survey of AFIT\u27s members failed to support Plant\u27s hypothesis. Exploratory factor analysis of the data revealed three constructs that may help explain information sharing from the individual\u27s point of view. In addition, a model of factors that contribute to information sharing is proposed

Knowledge withholding intentions in teams: the roles of normative conformity, affective bonding, rational choice and social cognition

The decision of members in a knowledge-intensive team to withhold their knowledge may threaten the performance of the team. To address the problem of knowledge resource risk in project teams, we maintain that it is important to understand why team members choose to withhold their knowledge, conceptualized as knowledge-withholding intention. In line with the literature on effort withholding, the research on multifoci relations between justice perceptions and social exchanges, and social cognitive theory, we proposed that the social exchange relationships that individuals form in the workplace, their perceptions of justice, and their knowledge withholding self-efficacy would influence their knowledge-withholding intentions. Through a survey of 227 information system development team workers, we found that all social exchange relationship variables had a significant impact on knowledge-withholding intentions. However, the justice perception variables only indirectly influenced knowledge-withholding intentions through the mediation of social exchange relationships. In addition, one of the task variables, task interdependence, influenced knowledge withholding intention through the mediation of knowledge withholding self-efficacy. Our results contribute to the knowledge management literature by providing a better understanding of the antecedents of knowledge withholding. We also offer suggestions for future research utilizing the framework of Kidwell and Bennett (1993) to study effort and knowledge withholding