Knowledge leakage, an Achilles’ heel of knowledge sharing

Ali Vafaei-Zadeh, Haniruzila Hanifah, Behzad Foroughi and Yashar Salamzadeh ()
Additional contact information
Ali Vafaei-Zadeh: Universiti Sains Malaysia
Haniruzila Hanifah: Universiti Sains Malaysia
Behzad Foroughi: Universiti Sains Malaysia
Yashar Salamzadeh: Universiti Sains Malaysia

Eurasian Business Review, 2019, vol. 9, issue 4, No 4, 445-461

Abstract: Abstract In today’s knowledge-based economy, organizations are progressively accumulating the knowledge, which they required for innovation, from outside their boundaries. Having accepted the important role of knowledge sharing in innovation performance, it is disappointing to note that the potential harmful impacts of accidental and intentional knowledge leakage on this relationship are still neglected or undeveloped in the literature. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the impact of knowledge sharing and entrepreneurial orientation on organization’s innovation performance, considering intentional and accidental leakage of knowledge. Data were collected using a structured questionnaire from 151 manufacturing SMEs operating in Malaysia, listed in Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers (FMM) directory of 2017. Purposive sampling technique was used in this study and data were analyzed using partial least squares technique. The findings of this study show that there is a positive and significant relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and knowledge sharing (R2 = 0.140). Moreover, knowledge sharing and entrepreneurial orientation have a positive and significant effect on innovation performance (R2 = 0.500). In addition, the results show that accidental knowledge leakage negatively moderates the relationship between knowledge sharing and innovation performance. However, accidental knowledge leakage has no moderating effect in the same relationship. This research is important due to the increasing complexity and the networked nature of innovation and high risk of knowledge leakage in this environment. The findings of this study contribute to the understanding of the potentially positive and negative issues related to entrepreneurial orientation, knowledge sharing, innovation performance, and knowledge leakage, which have thus far remained empirically under-researched.

Keywords: Entrepreneurial orientation; Knowledge sharing; Innovation performance; Knowledge leakage; SMEs; Malaysia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s40821-019-00128-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:eurasi:v:9:y:2019:i:4:d:10.1007_s40821-019-00128-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/40821

DOI: 10.1007/s40821-019-00128-7

Access Statistics for this article

Eurasian Business Review is currently edited by Marco Vivarelli

More articles in Eurasian Business Review from Springer, Eurasia Business and Economics Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().