Knowledge seeking and anonymity in digital work settings

Maren Mickeler, Pooyan Khashabi, Marco Kleine and Tobias Kretschmer

Strategic Management Journal, 2023, vol. 44, issue 10, 2413-2442

Abstract: Research Summary Employees often need knowledge from colleagues to complete tasks successfully. With distributed and remote work becoming more common, organizations increasingly rely on digital technologies, such as organizational platforms, to support members' knowledge exchange. We study factors that hinder employees from seeking knowledge from others on such platforms. We argue that individuals' seeking decisions depend on expected social‐psychological costs and economic considerations and posit that both can be muted by anonymizing seekers. In two experiments, we test our conjectures and find that both types of expected costs reduce knowledge seeking. Social‐psychological costs decrease individuals' knowledge seeking, while adding economic costs further reduces seeking. Moreover, in digital settings, female knowledge seekers are more sensitive to their identity being known than males and thus benefit more from anonymity. Managerial Summary Distributed and remote work arrangements, often subsumed under the label “new work”, often rely on digital technologies to enable the exchange of relevant knowledge among colleagues. For example, in the US, two‐thirds of S&P 500 firms already maintain some form of digital platform for knowledge exchange, although with mixed success. Employees may avoid seeking knowledge on these platforms both for social‐psychological (a fear of appearing incompetent to their peers) and economic (fear of suffering career consequences) reasons. In a series of (lab and vignette) experiments, we show that both can reduce knowledge seeking and that these implicit costs can be minimized especially in digital contexts through anonymity (to minimize social‐psychological consequences) and separating knowledge seeking platforms by hierarchical levels (to minimize potential economic consequences).

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3504

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:bla:stratm:v:44:y:2023:i:10:p:2413-2442

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0143-2095

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Strategic Management Journal from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().