Abstract: As Chinese companies accelerate their shift from “Made in China” to “Created in China”, efficient team knowledge sharing is increasingly becoming a crucial cornerstone for independent innovation within these companies. Based on the valence of knowledge content, team knowledge sharing can be divided into positive content (eg successful experiences) knowledge sharing and negative content (eg lessons from failure)knowledge sharing. While both contribute to enhancing a company's innovation efficiency, existing studies mostly focus on general knowledge sharing (without distinguishing the valence of knowledge content) or on positive content knowledge sharing, with little attention paid to focusing on negative content knowledge sharing.According to the viewpoint of “culture relativism”, due to the influence of traditional cultures in different countries/regions, team members from different countries/regions have markedly different motivations, attitudes, and intentions towards knowledge sharing. Chinese traditional culture has profound and unique values and claims, which guide the willingness of Chinese corporate team members to share knowledge profoundly and for a long time. Therefore, exploring the generating mechanism of team members' negative content knowledge sharing intention from the perspective of the Chinese traditional culture is an interesting and important research topic.
Due to the fact that team members' negative content knowledge sharing exposes the shortcomings of team members, in the Chinese context, this is considered a typical “revealing shortcomings” behavior. Therefore, this paper names it as team members'“Revealing Shortcoming Knowledge Sharing” (RSKS). Based on the identity of a person whose weaknesses are exposed, this paper further subdivides it into two types, i.e. “Self-revealing Shortcoming Knowledge Sharing” (SRSKS) and “Other-revealing Shortcoming Knowledge Sharing” (ORSKS). Built on the literature review, this paper selects collectivism and face orientation as representative variables of the Chinese traditional culture, exploring their effects on the two types of RSKS intentions. Additionally, based on the trait activation theory, this paper selects team member exchange as the moderating variable, examining its moderating effects between the two typical variables of the Chinese traditional culture and the two types of RSKS intentions. This paper conducts a questionnaire survey among 23 high-tech enterprises in the Yangtze River Delta region of China, receiving 286 valid responses. After conducting reliability tests, validity tests, common method bias tests, and correlation analyses on the data, this article utilizes multilevel regression analysis to examine the main effects of the two typical variables of the Chinese traditional culture and the moderating effects of team member exchange.
The results show that: (1)Collectivism significantly promotes SRSKS intention and ORSKS intention, while face orientation significantly inhibits SRSKS intention and ORSKS intention. This reminds Chinese enterprises of paying attention to and distinguishing the positive or negative effects of different Chinese traditional cultures on RSKS,subsequently, adopting targeted governance measures to “seek benefits and avoid harm”. (2)Team member exchange not only weakens the positive effects of collectivism on SRSKS intention and ORSKS intention but also weakens the negative effects of face orientation on SRSKS intention and ORSKS intention. This suggests that Chinese enterprises can “offset” the negative impact of certain real-life cultural orientations of team members (eg low collectivism or high face orientation) on RSKS intentions by adjusting the exchange relationships among team members.The innovations of this paper lie in: (1)Exploring generating mechanism of RSKS intention, to some extent, addresses the inadequate focus of existing research on negative content knowledge sharing.(2)From the perspective of the Chinese traditional culture, the paper validates the effects of collectivism and face orientation (as representative variables of the Chinese traditional culture) on RSKS intentions. This provides reference and inspiration for subsequent study of how other traditional Chinese cultural variables affect RSKS. (3)It reveals the moderating effects of team member exchange between Chinese traditional cultures and RSKS intentions, and confirms that in relationship oriented Chinese society that emphasizes “courtesy demands reciprocity”, exchange relationship is an important contingent variable worthy of exploration.

Key words: collectivism, face orientation, RSKS, team member exchange

摘要： 随着中国企业从“中国制造”加速迈向“中国智造”,高效的团队知识共享日益成为中国企业自主创新的重要基石。聚焦团队情境中的揭短型知识共享,将揭短型知识共享细分为“揭自短”和“揭他短”两种类型,探究了在集体主义、面子取向和团队成员交换协同作用下团队揭短型知识共享意愿的生成机理。通过对长三角地区高新技术企业的286份问卷和情境脚本数据分析,结果表明:(1)集体主义与面子取向对团队揭短型知识共享意愿存在正负二元功效,其中集体主义促进两类揭短型知识共享意愿,面子取向抑制两类揭短型知识共享意愿;(2)在注重“礼尚往来”的关系型中国社会,团队交换关系作为重要的权变机制可同步削弱集体主义和弱面子取向对两类揭短型知识共享意愿的影响功效。

关键词: 集体主义, 面子取向, 揭短型知识共享, 团队成员交换