None of Your Beeswax: The Role of Perceived Coworker Nosiness and Interpersonal Trust in Predicting Knowledge Provision at Work

As group- and team-based employment structures increase in popularity, it is important to understand the factors that promote or inhibit the transfer of knowledge or information between employees. Given that knowledge transfer processes often occur as a result of requests for knowledge or information from information targets by information seekers, this dissertation focused on a specific form of information-seeking behaviors – coworker nosiness – and the process through which perceptions of coworker nosiness result in knowledge sharing and knowledge hiding behaviors. Perceived coworker nosiness refers to behaviors judged by information targets as high-frequency information-seeking behaviors that are meant to gather information that is overly personal in nature and/or irrelevant to information seekers\u27 abilities to carry out their jobs effectively. Although affective trust was hypothesized to mediate relationships between coworker nosiness and both knowledge sharing and knowledge hiding, results across two studies – one using an experimental methodology and the other using a time-lagged survey design – found that higher levels of cognitive trust felt toward information targets rather than affective trust resulted in more knowledge sharing and less knowledge hiding. Additional analyses were conducted to consider alternative explanations and examine relationships with other relevant constructs. Discussions of the strengths and limitations of both studies as well as the practical implications and future research directions are provided