Personal construct based factors affecting willingness to share knowledge between architects in a project design team

Abstract

Knowledge sharing is a topic of much current interest in academic and business fields. To identify those factors affecting the extent to which knowledge sharing takes place, a survey of architects working in architectural design institutes has been conducted in Beijing, Shanghai and Qingdao. Based on the survey data, factors influencing architects' willingness to share knowledge within a design team were empirically tested using a structural equation modeling method. The results show that social interaction between architects is the only factor which significantly affects their willingness to share knowledge. The practical implication is that team managers should increase team member social interaction in order that they become more willing to share knowledge, thereby improving team performance. The explained variance of the dependent variable is 17.9% in the model. Therefore future research is needed to test other factors which are not included in the current model.