Committed to share: commitment and CMC use as antecedents of knowledge sharing

Knowledge sharing is an important process in modern organizations, as successful knowledge sharing can result in shared intellectual capital, an increasingly important resource. In this paper, we study the influence of organizational commitment and the use of computer‐mediated communication (CMC) on knowledge sharing. In knowledge sharing, an important distinction is made between knowledge donating and knowledge collecting. Based on relevant literature, we hypothesize that commitment and CMC use are both positively related to both knowledge donating and knowledge collecting. We also hypothesize that CMC use positively influences commitment. On the basis of two case studies our conclusion is that CMC use is an antecedent of organizational commitment, and that such commitment, in turn, influences the willingness to both donate and collect knowledge. Further analyses lead to the conclusion that it is important to distinguish different processes of knowledge sharing (donating and collecting), different levels of commitment and knowledge sharing (organizational and departmental), and different modes of CMC use in order to get a full grasp of the relationship between commitment, knowledge sharing and CMC use.