The Impact of Emotional Intelligence on Knowledge Sharing Behaviour

• Main Authors: Obermayer, Nóra, Kovári, Edit
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Altruism; Attitudes; Behavior; Competitive advantage; Emotional intelligence; Emotions; Employees; Gender; Influence; Knowledge economy; Knowledge management; Knowledge sharing; Middle management; Reputations; Self awareness; Self control; Success
• ISSN: 2048-8963; 2048-8971

In the era of knowledge economy, knowledge is increasingly seen as the most important strategic asset. A significant part of the knowledge possessed by an organization is within the knowledge workers. Thus, it is important to understand what encourages and what holds back individuals from sharing knowledge. Employees' willingness to share knowledge can be influenced by individual factors like people behaviours, motives and characteristics. Emotional intelligence can be one of the individual factors that can play an important role in forming their knowledge sharing endeavours. The paper aims to reveal the relationship between emotional intelligence and knowledge sharing of employees of Hungarian organizations. More specifically the relationship between the factors of emotional intelligence such as Well-being, Self-control, Sociability and Emotionality with the factors of knowledge sharing Altruism, Reciprocity, Reputation, Loss of Knowledge and Organizational reward have been investigated. Furthermore the study sheds light on the role of individual characteristics such as gender, generation, qualification and tenure considering size of the organization. The research has been carried out among more than 200 Hungarian employees from different industries. Significant positive relationship can be identified between employees' emotional intelligence and knowledge sharing behaviour. Well-being, Emotionality, Self-control and Sociability as emotional intelligence factors show relation to Altruism, Loss of knowledge and Reputation. Among individual factors, differences can be identified regarding generation and position, while gender and education do not seem to play a significant role in this relationship. Regarding organizational characteristics, differences can be detected according to the size of the organization. The outcome of the research can help companies, managers and HR specialists to learn how to trigger knowledge sharing behaviour according to gender and position while taking the size of the organisation into consideration. The paper reviews the results of the empirical study and concludes with a discussion of a potential new research direction and practical implications.