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This paper aims to focus on the relationships between the levels of knowledge and the type of knowledge transfer approaches, and the relationships between the types of knowledge and the knowledge transfer approaches which were adopted in a study of knowledge transfer from a US‐based technical support center to an offshore support center in China.

The research was conducted as an interpretive case study. Three techniques (i.e. document review, participant observation, and semi‐structured interviews) were employed for data collection in the field.

The findings indicate that the lower the level of recipient absorptive and retentive capacity, the more difficulty the recipient will have in acquiring tacit and complex types of knowledge, and the more formal structured knowledge transfer approach the recipient will need to adopt. The results identify that “structured transfer stages” was used by novices to transfer embrained and encoded knowledge, while “unstructured copy” was widely adopted by advanced beginners to transfer encoded and embodied knowledge, “unstructured adaptation” was mainly utilized by those at the competence level to transfer embodied and embedded knowledge, and “unstructured fusion” was preferred by recipients at the proficiency level to transfer embodied and embedded knowledge as well.

The findings contribute to an understanding of the knowledge transfer processes required when US‐based firms outsource business processes to offshore countries with significantly different cultural contexts. The findings also reflect the testing of possible analytical structures for understanding the processes of knowledge transfer, and the mechanisms for knowledge transfer in a cross‐cultural business context.

The paper provides new insights into the knowledge transfer process for different levels of knowledge acquisition in a cross‐cultural business context.

The purpose of this paper is to envisage human characteristics and resources as critical factors in the adoption process. While an individual’s intention to adopt knowledge is considered as the primary motivator in the adoption process, these characteristics, in the appropriate amount, can accelerate the recipients’ knowledge adoption behavior. In this study four personal characteristics, comprising shared language between a knowledge sender and a recipient, the recipient’s prior knowledge, the recipient’s enjoyment in adopting knowledge, and the recipient’s self-confidence have been chosen.

This research uses four human characteristics, consisting of shared language between knowledge senders and recipients, recipients’ prior knowledge, recipients’ enjoyment in knowledge adoption, and recipients’ self-confidence, to identify their optimal roles in the adoption process. Along with the intention to adopt new knowledge, each of these characteristics was tested in both forms. A survey was conducted with white collar workers. Nine models were designed and regression technique was used for analyzing data and interpreting outcomes of these models.

This study reveals that shared language between a knowledge sender and a recipient as well as a recipient’s self-confidence to adopt new knowledge directly enhances the individual’s likelihood to start learning. Shared language and self-confidence perform better as mutual predictors, while prior knowledge and enjoyment are the moderators.

The research outcome is beneficial in the designing of organizational business strategies. Shared language between an instructor and a learner increases likelihood to adopt knowledge, thus it is advantageous to arrange prerequisite mandatory courses in order to enhance a learner’s language proficiencies. Organizations can leverage their employees’ prior knowledge if it is perceived to be low. To do so, supervisors should link eagerness in learning and augmenting competencies to career advancement. Advice from, and rapport with a supervisor is essential. Effective strategies can improve the knowledge sharing goals, and in turn achieve business objectives as a whole.

The purpose of this study is to examine knowledge-sharing phenomena from the perspective of recipients’ characteristics. Specifically, this study examines the influence of knowledge recipients’ competence, learning attitude and personal relationship with knowledge sharer on knowledge sharers’ willingness to share.

The authors conducted two studies, a scenario experimental study and a field survey study to test their hypotheses about the effects of recipients’ characteristics on knowledge sharers’ willingness to share.

The results revealed that recipients’ characteristics play different roles in different situations (responsive and proactive knowledge sharing) in triggering the knowledge sharers’ motivation to share. In responsive knowledge sharing, a recipient’s learning attitude and personal relationship with the knowledge sharer affected the sharer’s willingness to share. In proactive knowledge sharing, a recipient’s professional ability and personal relationship with the sharer significantly affected the sharer’s willingness to share.

The scenario experiment may suffer from the problem of social desirability and the external validity; this study only focuses on the simple main effect of knowledge recipients’ characteristics.

First, managers should encourage employees to seek information and knowledge from other colleagues, and organizations could provide support for their interaction. Second, managers need to consider the composition of team members. Third, team managers may encourage each member to develop their own special skill or knowledge. Fourth, managers could make some efforts to develop a climate of trust among employees.

Some organization can also use practice like recognition of internal copyright or patent to protect employees’ new ideas or knowledge.

First, this study clarifies the relationship between knowledge sharing and other working behaviors. Second, this study contributes to the understanding of how episodic factors affect working behaviors, which has been given little attention in previous research.

This study aims to adopt the microfoundation perspective to investigate undesirable knowledge rejection by individuals in organizations in the context of counterproductive knowledge behavior (CKB). The paper advances a conceptual framework of the conditions of knowledge rejection by individuals and their respective knowledge rejection behavior types.

This study reviews the limited literature on knowledge rejection and outline a set of antecedents leading to rejecting knowledge as well as a set of different types of knowledge rejection behaviors. This study reviews and synthesizes articles on knowledge rejection from a microfoundation perspective.

The proposed conceptual framework specifies four particular conditions for knowledge rejection and outlines four respective knowledge rejection behavior types resulting from these conditions. Recipients’ lack of capacity leads to ineptitude, lack of motivation leads to dismissal of knowledge, lack of alignment with the source leads to disruption and doubts about the validity of external knowledge lead to resistance. The authors treat these behaviors as variants of CKB, as they can hinder the productive use of knowledge resources in the organization.

Further investigation of both knowledge rejection causes and the resulting knowledge rejection behaviors will ensure a more thorough grasp of the relationships between them, both in terms of the inherent nature of these relationships and their dynamics that would likely be context-sensitive. Although this study focuses only on the individual level, future studies can conduct multi-level analyses of undesirable knowledge rejection, including team and organizational levels.

Practitioners can use the framework to identify, diagnose and manage knowledge rejection more meaningfully, accurately and purposefully in their organizations. This study offers valuable insights for managers facing undesirable knowledge rejection, and provides recommendations on how to address this behavior, improves the constructive use of knowledge resources and the effectiveness of knowledge processes in their organizations. Managers should be aware of undesirable knowledge rejection, its potential cost or concealed cost to their organizations and develop strategies to reduce or prevent it.

The paper contributes toward understanding the relatively neglected topic of knowledge rejection in the knowledge management field and offers a new way of conceptualizing the phenomenon. It proposes that there are two types of knowledge rejection – undesirable and desirable – and advances a more precise and up-to-date definition of undesirable knowledge rejection. Responding to calls for more research on CKBs, the study examines a hitherto unresearched behavior of knowledge rejection and provides a foundation for further study in this area.

This paper seeks to propose the factors that increase or lessen an individual's tendencies to acquire knowledge from others and uncovers the difference between an expert and a novice in the knowledge domain.

The study adopted a survey method and examined hypotheses by applying the structural equation model method. The unit of analysis was an individual.

The research illustrates that individual knowledge acquisition is influenced by the recipient's perceived value of knowledge content and knowledge source. The influence differs between those who are experts and those who are novices in the acquired knowledge domain.

The data were collected from organizations that were willing to participate in the study and not randomly selected; the possibility that the samples were atypical of a more general population exists. This study advances theoretical development by highlighting individual knowledge acquisition which fills the gap between two main knowledge management processes, i.e. knowledge transfer and knowledge application.

Management interest in enhancing knowledge exchange should pay attention to value signals both from knowledge content and knowledge source that influence acquiring knowledge by recipients.

By revealing the value factors associated with individual knowledge acquisition and providing empirical evidence, the study contributes to richer understanding of what should be perceived by potential knowledge recipients in order to enhance their acquiring knowledge from others.

The purpose of this paper is to adopt the recipient’s perspective to explore multi-level antecedents’ effects on knowledge transfer using social capital and social network theories.

Social network and general attribute survey responses from 331 employees were analyzed through hierarchical linear modeling to verify the study’s multi-level research model and hypotheses.

A recipient’s trust in colleagues positively influences knowledge transfer and company tenure has a negative impact. At a dyadic level, the perceived expertise of a source, in addition to strength of ties, exerts a positive effect on knowledge transfer. Additionally, a recipient’s network centrality moderates the effects of dyadic relationships on knowledge transfer.

This study deepened the current understanding of the role of social capital in knowledge transfer from a recipient’s perspective. Three dimensions of a recipient’s social capital respectively showed significant, but different types of influence on knowledge transfer. Interaction effects between individual and dyadic level antecedents should be considered as well.

Both a strong tie at a dyadic level and a diverse network at an individual level should be nurtured to facilitate knowledge transfer. In addition, bi-directional knowledge transfer between seasoned employees and new employees should be promoted.

Most studies have focused on motivating a knowledge source, assuming that a recipient is always ready to adopt a source’s knowledge. To reduce this bias, the current study examined social capital’s role in knowledge transfer from a recipient’s perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to add a process perspective to the literature on repatriate knowledge transfer (RKT) and to understand how the knowledge transfer process unfolds in the repatriation context. Thus, this qualitative study uses existing knowledge transfer process models to assess their applicability to the context of repatriation and explain the micro-processes during RKT.

To provide a rich understanding of these processes from the repatriate perspective, critical incidents reported by 29 German and US American repatriates were content-analyzed.

The findings are summarized in a proposed RKT process model, which describes the roles and knowledge transfer-related activities of repatriates, recipients and supervisors as well as their interaction during four transfer phases: assessment, initiation, execution and evaluation.

The experiences of repatriates from different geographic areas as well as the perspectives of knowledge recipients and supervisors were not studied but should be included in future research. In addition, future research could test the applicability of the identified micro-processes to different knowledge transfer contexts.

Managers can use the findings to facilitate the RKT process more effectively because the type of organizational support offered can be aligned with the changing needs of repatriates, recipients and supervisors during the four identified phases.

This is the first study that takes a process perspective to understand RKT. The integration of the current findings with the existing literature can enable a more nuanced view on RKT.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of national culture on the structured knowledge transfer from a US‐based (onshore) technical support center to an offshore support center in China.

The research was conducted as an interpretive case study. Three techniques (i.e. document review, participant observation, and semi‐structured interviews) were employed for data collection in the field.

The findings identify that knowledge tacitness, knowledge gaps, cultural and communication difficulties and weak relationships were the critical barriers to successful knowledge transfer in a cross‐cultural knowledge transfer context. It was found that, when a provider and a recipient are located in different individualism/collectivism, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance cultural dimensions, there will be a reduced likelihood of successful knowledge transfer in a structured knowledge transfer process. However, peer‐to‐peer help, close relationships and proactive learning may assist in decreasing the knowledge transfer difficulties.

The research was limited to one organization in one industry (the IT support industry) and in one country (China). There could be both industry‐specific issues and national cultural issues that may affect the findings and conclusions. However, the paper has important practical implications for organizations that are trying to carry out transfer of organizational knowledge or to acquire organizational knowledge in a cross‐cultural business context.

The findings provide insight into the cultural issues implicated in the structured knowledge transfer process, when a knowledge provider and a recipient are from different cultural dimensions, as well as offering more general insight into the mechanism of knowledge transfer in the cross‐cultural business context.

This paper aims to examine how knowledge sharing behavior is influenced by three sets of dynamics: a rational calculus that weighs the costs and benefits of sharing; a dispositional preference that favors certain patterns of sharing outcomes; and a relational effect based on working relationships.

Concepts from social exchange theory, social value orientation, and leader‐member exchange theory are applied to analyze behavioral intentions to share knowledge. The study population consists of employees of a large pension fund in Canada. Participants answered a survey that used allocation games and situational vignettes to measure social value orientation, propensity to share knowledge, and perception of cost and benefit.

The results suggest that personal preferences about the distribution of sharing outcomes, individual perceptions about costs and benefits, and structural relationship with knowledge recipients, all affect knowledge sharing behavior significantly. Notably, it was found that propensity to share knowledge is positively related to perceived benefit to the recipient, thus suggesting that evaluation of cost and benefit in social exchange is not limited to self‐interest, but is also influenced by perceived recipient benefit. Moreover, it was found that the relationship with the sharing target (superior or colleague) also influenced sharing.

Most studies emphasize the organizational benefits of knowledge sharing. This study examines knowledge sharing from the perspective of the individual who approaches knowledge sharing as a social exchange that involves perceptions of costs and benefits, preferences about sharing outcomes, and relationship with the sharing target. The study also introduces innovative methods to measure social value orientation and propensity to share knowledge.

This study aims to identify effective strategies and practices for higher education institutions (HEIs) to enhance their knowledge recipients’ knowledge absorptive capacity.

Questionnaire surveys and interviews were conducted to examine the effectiveness of a knowledge transfer (KT) project and these were administered by HEIs in Hong Kong. Pre- and post-test questionnaire surveys with t-tests were used to evaluate changes in the knowledge absorptive capacity of 1,014 participants from 20 schools. Qualitative interviews were conducted to investigate school leaders’ perception of the effectiveness of the KT strategies.

Results revealed significant differences between the pre- and post-tests in all the elements of absorptive capacity. The processes of knowledge acquisition, contextualisation, internalisation and externalisation in a closed-loop mechanism were identified as effective KT strategies. Conducting training programmes, workshops, consultations, work-based studies and presentation seminars were found to be effective KT practices to support the recipients in acquiring, contextualising, internalising and externalising knowledge.

HEIs should provide consultative support to recipients by conducting work-based studies and presentations to enhance their knowledge absorptive capacities.

This study contributes empirical evidence to validate the application of Liyanage et al.’s (2009) KT model to HEIs’ KT model for the purpose of designing KT activities and enhancing the absorption capacities of the recipients. This research contributes an empirical closed-loop KT model, effective KT strategies and practices for HEIs to support their knowledge recipients so that they can internalise the acquired knowledge.