Knowledge sharing, cui prodest? Organizational creativity

Improving organizational creativity is not an easy task. According to the interactionist perspective drawn by Woodman et al. (1993), it requires several aspects to be taken into account, such as the creative process, the creative product, the creative person, and the creative situation, as all of them interact with each other in determining creativity. Extant research offers some evidence highlighting the inherent complexity of organizational creativity, by investigating the importance of a knowledge-sharing culture (Chen et al., 2014) as well as of contextual factors, such as organizational (Perry-Smith and Shalley, 2003; Shalley, Zhou and Oldham, 2004; Baer and Oldham, 2006) and technological factors (Lindič et al., 2011). However, results reported are fragmented. In an attempt to extend prior research, we found that while intra-organizational knowledge-sharing processes are vital to organizational creativity, contextual influences may be detrimental. Over the years companies’ memes have switched from “if only we knew what we know” (e.g. O’Dell and Grayson, 1998) to “if only we shared what we know” (e.g. Majchrzak et al., 2012).