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Past research on the motivational processes underpinning knowledge sharing has assumed that the sharing processes are similar for all individuals. Yet, sharing is a fundamental affiliative behavior, and the sharing processes can differ between people. This study aims to propose and test a model of the moderating influence that employee attachment patterns have on the theory of reasoned action (TRA)-defined knowledge sharing processes.

The authors administered a questionnaire to 1,103 employees from a range of industries who participated in an online Qualtrics survey. Advanced forms for structural equation modeling and latent profile analysis were used to assess the proposed model.

The results revealed that participants in the study exhibited the latent profiles corresponding to secure, dismissive, preoccupied and fearful patterns. The preoccupied cohort had the lowest knowledge sharing behavior, yet the strongest links within the sharing process. Secure, dismissive and fearful had similar sharing levels, but the strength of the TRA-defined processes differed. These findings underscore equifinality: although sharing may be approximately equal across different attachment patterns, the fundamental processes underpinning sharing differ.

The authors used self-report data, given that sharing attitudes, norms and intentions may not be overly amenable to ratings even from well-acquainted others. Further, the use of advanced analytical methods helps to minimize common method concerns. Additionally, causal mechanisms underscoring the TRA have been demonstrated (Ajzen and Fishbein, 2005), allowing us to explore the moderating role of attachment patterns.

This study speaks to the importance of considering employees’ attachment patterns, and developing comprehensive intra-organizational norms, policies and systems that support and encourage knowledge sharing from employees with a variety of attachment patterns.

This study uniquely contributes to knowledge sharing literatures by incorporating attachment patterns as moderators within the TRA-defined sharing processes. The authors provide important insights on the role of individuals’ attachment patterns have for knowledge sharing behaviors, but also highlight how structure of knowledge sharing differed across subgroups of employees, determined based on their dispositional attachment pattern.

The aim of this inquiry is to uncover the pattern of knowledge-sharing behaviour among the undergraduate and postgraduate students of private universities in Bangladesh.

This inquiry studied the knowledge-sharing pattern of undergraduate and graduate students by utilising a questionnaire-based open-ended survey from several private universities in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Apart from the descriptive statistics, the research used t-test to further explain the data.

This research focussed on seven areas of knowledge-sharing pattern. The data collected from 350 respondents from different private universities suggest that there are significant differences in the knowledge-sharing pattern between undergraduate and graduate students. Overall, this research documents that the postgraduate students have shown higher perceived attitudes towards knowledge sharing, compared to undergraduate students.

This research applied a descriptive study to understand knowledge-sharing patterns among undergraduate and postgraduate students, rather than a correlational study to ascertain the relationship among variables.

This research has contributed to the knowledge-sharing research in several aspects. In fact, this study extended the research findings of Wei et al. (2012) by examining the patterns of knowledge sharing in a different socioeconomic environment. Although this research investigated the practice of knowledge sharing of undergraduate and postgraduate students by adapting the instrument of Wei et al. (2012), one of the significant contributions of this research is to explore the behavioural aspects of knowledge-sharing pattern among undergraduate and postgraduate students from different private universities in Bangladesh. By interpreting the knowledge-sharing pattern of undergraduate and postgraduate students of private universities, this inquiry will assist the government’s policymakers, management of individual universities and academicians to come up with novel methods of instruction and to transform the knowledge-driven higher learning establishment.

The majority of studies on knowledge sharing have been conducted in an organisational context. This inquiry is one of few investigations to compare the knowledge-sharing patterns among undergraduate and postgraduate students in Bangladesh.

The purpose of this paper is to study the knowledge‐sharing patterns of undergraduate students in public and private universities.

A questionnaire survey was conducted on students of both the types of universities in Malaysia. Data were analyzed using SPSS.

Seven important areas have been the focus of this study: the general attitude towards knowledge sharing; preferred sources for study‐related tasks; perceived frequency of knowledge sharing for study‐related tasks; types of information and knowledge shared; preferred channels for knowledge sharing; factors limiting knowledge sharing; and knowledge sharing motivators. The data collected from 423 undergraduate students suggest that there are differences between the students in the public and private universities when it comes to knowledge sharing patterns.

The paper serves more as a descriptive study on the knowledge sharing patterns rather than a correlational study to find the relationship among variables.

The findings suggest that group activities should be structured in all curricula in order to encourage sharing among students. Academics are expected to play an important role to encourage their students to share by means of putting emphasis on collaborative learning to reduce competition among students. The management of universities can promote knowledge sharing by understanding the barriers and motivators of knowledge sharing.

The paper is among the first to compare the knowledge sharing patterns among private and public undergraduate students in Malaysia.

The complexity of knowledge in architectural design results in its unique management characteristics not being fully recognized and appreciated. Little research has been done in this area. This paper aims to bridge this knowledge gap.

A multiple‐case study methodology is applied to identify the knowledge sharing pattern in architectural design institutes in the People's Republic of China. Content analysis is employed to analyse the qualitative data collected by in‐depth interview, site observation and document review.

The results show that individual architects share their own knowledge by means of reflection‐in‐action, conversation and problem solving. Either formal or informal mentoring, legitimate peripheral participation, communities of practice and workshops are the major mechanisms for architectural design institutes to share organizational knowledge but the knowledge sharing pattern are quite different for different kinds of architectural design institutes.

The major limitation of this research is associated with sample selection. Although the cases being selected are fairly representative of the architectural design institutes in People's Republic of China, not all types of architectural design institutes are included due to the availability of data.

The identified knowledge sharing patterns can help managers of architectural design institutes as well as individual architects to better understand how knowledge is shared in their field and how to improve their overall performance.

This paper contributes to the existing body of research on how knowledge is shared in the construction industry. In particular, a knowledge sharing pattern is identified to offer insights in architectural design institutes in China. The paper addresses a number of research questions which are not fully explored in current literature.

Although knowledge sharing in online communities has been studied for many years, little is known about the determinants for individuals' knowledge sharing in online health communities (OHCs) surrounding smoking cessation. Examining the determinants of knowledge sharing in such OHCs from the social capital perspective may prove particularly enlightening.

A questionnaire-based online user survey of two smoking cessation OHCs, one based in Finland and one based in China, was performed. Performing data analysis with partial least squares (SmartPLS 3.0), the authors developed a model conceptualizing the structural, cognitive and relational dimensions of social capital as drivers for knowledge sharing in smoking cessation OHCs, with users' stage in giving up smoking as a moderator.

The results show that structural capital (social ties) and relational capital (reciprocity) are important motivators behind knowledge sharing in smoking cessation OHCs, and the authors found a moderating effect of the stage in quitting on the antecedents' relationship with knowledge sharing in these OHCs.

The study enriches understanding of knowledge sharing in smoking cessation OHCs, contributing to theory and identifying practical implications for such groups' administration.

This paper aims to investigate how students’ attitude (SA), students’ subjective norms (SN), students’ knowledge sharing intentions (KSI) can contribute to the enhancement of knowledge sharing behaviour (KSB) among students at higher education institutes (HEI) in Oman.

This study follows the quantitative methodology and the deductive causal research approach. The data were conveniently collected through a Web-based questionnaire (Google forms) from 285 active students who are affiliated to Omani universities. SPSS was used to statistically analyse the collected data, including partial least square-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM V3.3) to draw the results.

The study concluded that SA has both direct and indirect positive impact on SN, KSI and KSB. Moreover, the result revealed that there is a mediation effect between SA and KSB through KSI, SA and KSI when SN is playing as a mediation role.

Although this study contributes to the existing body of knowledge, this study is limited by the scarcity of the related literature in the Omani context. It is recommended that these shortfalls be addressed together while improving the knowledge-sharing behaviour among students and administrative staff. Furthermore, the potential variation between academic staff and students in terms of factors affecting their intentions to share knowledge within HEIs should be explored.

This research provides policymakers in academic fields with the appropriate approaches to leverage the knowledge-sharing behaviour amongst Omani students with the understanding of the main factors affecting individuals’ knowledge-sharing behaviours.

This will help in improving the means of employing and practising knowledge-sharing strategies within HEIs, which can generate competitive advantages amongst students and institutions while benefiting knowledge management strategies and its members.

The importance of the study stems from its context being conducted in Oman as a developing country. In addition, this study is one of the initial attempts to investigate KSB by considering SA, SN and KSI and its applicability on HEI in Oman. The findings of the study can serve as inputs to HEI in developing best practices across KSB dimensions and expanding the knowledge-sharing culture amongst HEI’s students in Oman. One of the developed strategies is the spreading of the knowledge-sharing culture among students by positively directing their attitude towards the practices of knowledge exchange.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors that stimulated the sharing of tacit and explicit knowledge and their effects on performance among research‐mode graduate students. The findings of this study provided a better understanding of the knowledge‐sharing activities among graduate students who were engaged in project‐based or individual learning activities.

The survey method was employed to gather data and the resulting data were analyzed using structural equation modeling. A total of 245 valid responses were collected from students enrolled in various graduate programmes at the main and branch campuses of Universiti Sains Malaysia.

The students reported a positive and constructive approach toward knowledge sharing with the exogenous variables, namely, trust, social networks, and information and communications technology (ICT) reporting significant positive direct effects on the mediating variables, namely, tacit and explicit knowledge. Only tacit knowledge had a significant direct effect on performance, the endogenous variable. In addition, the knowledge‐sharing activities were localized to the respective campuses.

The investigation involved samples from one university. A large sample size that involves other universities is needed in order to generalize the findings.

The paper offers a snapshot of the intensity and pattern of knowledge‐sharing behaviours that can be used to improve learning and performance among students engaged in individual learning.

To the authors' knowledge, no previous studies have investigated knowledge‐sharing activities among research‐mode students at the Master and Doctoral levels.

This study aims to build the intellectual structure of knowledge sharing (KS) research by objectively and systematically capturing and sketching the content of research papers published in the KS research area.

This study uses a systematic literature review for data collection, and content analysis and bibliometric techniques of citation and co-citation analysis for data analyses and interpretation.

Based on the study, the intellectual structure of KS research consisting of five themes has emerged. The five themes identified are: models, frameworks and understanding for KS, the behaviour-oriented perspective of KS, technology-oriented perspective of KS, KS barriers and KS and firm’s performance.

This study has used published literature extracted from selected journals using the web of science database. More journals and databases may be included in future studies.

This study will give future researchers a comprehensive understanding of KS discipline and serve as a quick reference and resource for those interested in KS research. It identifies major areas of KS for the practitioners to enable them to focus and apply various organizational interventions to derive a competitive advantage. The identified themes in the intellectual structure of KS will also provide a holistic view and give multiple perspectives to practitioners so that they can better manage KS in their organizations.

This is among early studies aiming to extract the intellectual structure of KS in the broad area of knowledge management research.

The growth of online social network sites and their conceptualization as affinity spaces makes them well suited for exploring how individuals share knowledge and practices around specific interests or affinities. The purpose of this study is to extend what is known about highly active/key actors in online affinity spaces, especially the ways in which they sustain and contribute to knowledge sharing.

This study analyzed 514 discussion posts gathered from an online affinity space on disease management. This study used a variety of methods to answer the research questions: the authors used discourse analyses to examine the conversations in the online affinity space, social network analyses to identify the structure of participation in the space and association rule mining and sentiment analysis to identify co-occurrence of discourse codes and sentiment of the discussions.

The results indicate that the quality and type of discourse varies considerably between key and other actors. Key actors’ discourse in the network serves to elaborate on and explain ideas and concepts, whereas other actors provide a more supportive role and engage primarily in storytelling.

This work extends what is known about informal mentoring and the role of key actors within affinity spaces by identifying specific discourse types and types of knowledge sharing that are characteristic of key actors. Also, this study provides an example of the use of a combination of rule mining association and sentiment analysis to characterize the nature of the affinity space.

Over the past decade, the cost of product development has increased drastically, and this is due to the inability of most enterprises to locate suitable and optimal collaborators for knowledge sharing. Nevertheless, knowledge sharing is a mechanism that helps people find the best collaborators with relevant knowledge. Hence, a new approach for locating optimal collaborators with relevant knowledge is needed, which could help enterprise in reducing cost and time in a knowledge-sharing environment. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

One unique challenge in the domain of knowledge sharing is that collaborators do not possess the same number of events resident in the knowledge available for sharing. In this paper, the authors present a new approach for locating optimal collaborators in knowledge-sharing environment using the combinatorial algorithm (CA-KSE).

The proposed pattern-matching approach implemented in Java is considered efficient for solving the issue peculiar to collaboration in knowledge-sharing domain. The authors benchmarked the proposed approach with its semi-global pairwise alignment and global alignment counterparts through scores comparison and the receiver operating characteristic curve. The results obtained from the comparisons showed that CA-KSE is a perfect test having an area under curve of 0.9659, compared to the other approaches.

The paper has proposed an efficient algorithm, which is considered better than related methods, for matching several collaborators (more than two) in KS environment. The method could be deployed in medical field for gene analysis, software organizations for distributed development and academics for knowledge sharing.

One sign of strength of this approach, compared to most sequence alignment approaches that can only match two collaborators at a time, is that it can match several collaborators at a faster rate.