Using interactive systems for knowledge sharing: The impact of individual contextual preferences in China

How Authoritarian Leadership and Renqing Orientation Improve Tacit Knowledge Sharing

“…Renqing orientation is popular among Chinese leaders; hence, guanxi-based resources exchange is regarded as fair by some employees in China; however, other employees prefer a contributionbased resources allocation system and deem renqing as unfair [6]. In line with these arguments, the guanxi network is found to increase performance and KS [23], whereas group guanxi is found to decrease PF [6]. Guanxi include face and renqing [17]; however, the KS literature has mainly focused on face and gave minimal attention to renqing [15,23,26].…”

“…However, the aforementioned fairness research mainly identified western socio-cultural factors from western theories as preditors of fairness, and focused minimal attention on the effect of indigenous factors in the eastern context [15,23]. Furthermore, although KS is regarded as a typical outcome of the social exchange between employers and employees, only a few studies have examined fairness-KS intention relationship [28].…”

“…Despite renqing is possibly to encouraging social exchange and reciprocity, prior literature denotes its double nature [6,15,23]. Repeated behavior becomes normative.…”

“…Previous scholars [15] have suggested that many IT-based KM initiatives have failed in China because IT cannot function as a substitute for the incentive effects of human relationships and social connectedness on KS. Therefore, exploring socio-cultural factors related to human relationships and social connectedness is important in Chinese KM research [15,23].…”

“…LRO refers to the tendency of a leader to care for subordinates emotional responses and to follow a form of social exchange norm in exchanging with "in-group" subordinates [17]. Several scholars have adopted the emic perspective to examine how KS is affected by face, including face giving, face gaining, and face maintenance [15,23,30 ], but have ignored the effect of renqing, which is notably an important exchange rule in Chinese society. Thus, our second question explores whether the renqing orientation of leaders moderates the effect of authoritarian leadership on employee tacit KS intention through fairness perception.…”