The influence of personality traits on knowledge sharing in the context of research supervision

Abstract

In this era, knowledge management is one of the important topics in management research. Knowledge-based organizations have started to recognize and value their intellectual capital, as a major resource among other existing resources they have, to achieve competitive advantage. However, a huge amount of knowledge possessed and stored in the individuals instead of organizations. This research focuses on the role that personality traits play in individual’s knowledge sharing. The main objective of this study is to investigate the effect of personality traits; agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience on knowledge sharing. In addition, this study also indentifies the dominating supervisory type; coach type or mentor type and also examines the level of knowledge sharing for each type. This study used Five-Factor Model of personality, Social Learning Theory and Social Capital Theory as its theoretical foundation. A total of 400 questionnaires was distributed to doctoral students at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. Two hundred and four usable questionnaires were returned for analysis. Multiple regression and t-test analysis were used to analyze the data. The results of this study indicate that personality traits; agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience significantly affect the level of knowledge sharing of research supervisors in the student –supervisor relationship. Openness to experience was found to be the most influencing element. Furthermore, the results of this study revealed that there is a small difference of numbers between both supervisory types; coach-type and mentor-type, prevented the researcher from concluding one dominating type. It was also found that there is no significant difference in the level of knowledge sharing between coach – type and mentor – type supervisors. Based on the findings, several implications and recommendations were discussed.