Intellectual capital and knowledge sharing: the mediating role of organisational knowledge-sharing climate

Abstract

Healthcare organisations are facing the constant trade off to contain expenditures without sacrificing the quality of patient’s care. This challenge to do ‘more with less’ induced healthcare executives to heavily invest in innovations activities in order to increase the efficiency of their organisations.\nBy taking an individual-level perspective, our study focuses on knowledgesharing behaviour among healthcare practitioners as a critical element to continuously improve the performance of healthcare organisations. Specifically we explore the effect of intellectual capital on practitioners’ knowledge sharing\nbehaviour, and propose organisational knowledge-sharing climate\nas mediator. We conducted a survey on three healthcare organisations. Our results substantiate the positive link between intellectual capital and knowledge-sharing behaviour, and reveal that organisational knowledge-sharing climate fully mediates this relationship. These findings provide hospital managers with key implications for the management of intellectual capital as a lever to improve the sharing and the diffusion of knowledge among practitioners.