The effect of trust on knowledge sharing between project teams

Abstract

Although there has been many studies that were conducted over the years about trust and its influence on knowledge sharing, the phenomenon in the context of project teams still remains ambiguous in theory and in practice. Moreover, managers often have difficulty in creating a workspace that team members are able to generate trust in order to encourage knowledge sharing. For this reason, this current research aims to examine three forms of trust namely: affect-based trust, cognition-based trust, and information-based trust, and their influences on the sharing of knowledge of project teams. In order to successfully conduct the research, the researcher shall provide an empirical investigation to explain the proposed relationships between the three forms of trust and knowledge sharing regarding project team members in various organizations by implementing a quantitative methodology research. A survey data of 256 responses was used to conduct confirmatory factor analysis and hierarchical multiple regression, and the hypotheses were tested. The results indicate that all the three proposed relationships between trust and knowledge sharing are positively and significantly supported, with affect-based trust being the most significant influence on knowledge sharing. Consequently, this research provides insights for managers about the value of project team members’ trust on their sharing of knowledge and proposes future directions for improvement.