Knowledge Adoption in China: The Roles of Ganqing and Renqing

This study sought to advance our understanding of what affects knowledge adoption (a key process of knowledge sharing) in China by exploring the impact of two main affective determinants (ganqing and renqing) of Chinese interpersonal relationships on Chinese employees’ adoption of explicit and tacit knowledge contributed by their peers. Compared with two other main processes (contribution and seeking) of knowledge sharing and their determinants, knowledge adoption and its contributing factors have received much less attention in the extant literature on knowledge sharing in China. The effects of ganqing and renqing on explicit and tacit knowledge adoption were examined and tested with the data from a survey of 243 MBA students in China. The results from the hierarchical regression analyses showed that ganqing was positively related to explicit knowledge adoption and tacit knowledge adoption. Renqing was also found to be positively related to the adoption of both types of knowledge. While effective knowledge sharing relies on both the ‘supply of knowledge’ through knowledge contribution and the ‘demand of knowledge’ via knowledge adoption, prior research on knowledge sharing in China has placed more emphasis on the supply side of knowledge sharing and its determinants. By linking knowledge adoption to two affective factors, the findings from this study help address this imbalance in the knowledge sharing research related to China and increase our knowledge of what might have hindered the diffusion of knowledge management in China and how to better promote it. Other research and practical implications from the study are discussed.