The Impact of Knowledge Sharing Towards Higher Education Performance in Research Productivity

Introduction

Industrial revolution 4.0 marked by the rapid advancement of automation and digitalization has disrupted the global economy (Sung, 2018). On the one hand, it resulted in the decrease of labor demands in several sectors, but on the other hand, it increases the need for labor/ new professions in new sectors emerging with the dynamics of the disruptions. An illustration of the development of robotic systems in the manufacturing industry has led to a decrease in the need for labor in the assembly, but on the other hand raises new needs for operators who can operate and develop robotic systems (Mcleod, 2019). One key factor that plays a role in adapting to such a change is the ability to innovate (Morrar et al., 2017). Higher education as a center of knowledge development is expected to take the lead to innovate. The ability to foster innovation in higher education is indicated by engaging in research.

University’s ability to innovate can be realized through research productivity (Fuglie et al., 2017). Research productivity is considered as a measure that describes the quality of higher education management (Kwiek, 2018).

Previous studies have been conducted to investigate factors that shape research productivity in universities. These studies include identifying the impact of curriculum development toward research productivity (Aithal, 2016), studying the impact of creative personality and working environment on research productivity (Kim & Choi, 2017), analyzing the impact of funding on the nature and sustainability of research capacity (Maassen, 2015), studying the implementation of Scholarly Research Project (SRP) to boost students’ initiatives to produce research (Conroy et al., 2018), examining the correlation between research, teaching and service, and the driving factors causing such correlations (Barney et al., 2018).

Research productivity is contingent upon the degree of creativity of individuals (Long et al., 2014; Sahoo et al., 2017). One of the efforts to enhance the creativity of individuals is by means of knowledge sharing activity (Carmeli & Paulus, 2015; Dong et al., 2017; Liao & Chen, 2018; Mittal & Dhar, 2015). Knowledge sharing can stimulate individuals to think critically and intelligently, and as a result, new ideas are generated to carry out research (Aulawi & Govindaraju, 2008).

Recently, knowledge sharing has received much attention in the field of management. Scholars in the field have begun to recognize that to compete in a rapidly advanced environment, and it is urgent for individuals within organizations to continuously enhance their competencies of skills and knowledge (Huang, 2014). Human resource capacity building is a major factor to support continuous innovation in an organization (Galli, 2018). Such a shift emerged from a view that the effort to enhance their competencies will push organizations to foster knowledge creation to generate quality product/ solution for the society, considering that one benefit of knowledge sharing is to advance learning process that implicates the generation of new knowledge (Mueller, 2014).

Organization’s knowledge assets also include an individual’s knowledge, particularly individuals who generate, store, access, and implement knowledge in performing their tasks (Nonaka & Konno, 1998). To provide benefits valued by organizations, knowledge owned by individuals must be shared with the purpose to eliminate knowledge gaps among individuals and encourage the generation of new knowledge. The speed of knowledge flow in an organization is highly contingent upon individuals’ knowledge sharing activity in the organization, which means that when knowledge sharing is inhibited, the knowledge in the organization will not be used optimally (Bock et al., 2005).

Several studies explained the impact of knowledge sharing on the performance of organizations (Oyemomi et al., 2016). Several studies identified the impact of knowledge sharing toward innovation capability (Kremer et al., 2018; Ritala et al., 2015; Tufail et al., 2016). Other studies have also explored the impact of knowledge sharing toward intellectual capital (Allameh, 2018; Mir et al., 2018).

This study is intended to contribute to the identification of the impact of knowledge sharing toward research productivity, which carries implications toward efforts to enhance the quality of higher education management in the face of the challenges of globalization.