The effect of member-team conscientiousness fit on knowledge sharing

Drawing on research in person-team fit and on similarity-attraction in personality, we examined the effects of (in)congruence between a member’s personality trait of conscientiousness and team composition of conscientiousness on the members’ knowledge sharing behavior. We hypothesized that higher congruence in member and team conscientiousness would lead to more knowledge sharing of the member within the team. We conducted three studies by using data from China, Taiwan and United State. With the methodology of multi-level polynomial regression, we found consistent results showing that when a member and his/her team were congruent in conscientiousness, the member shared more knowledge with other teammates. We also found that voice in team partially mediated the relationship between person-team fit in conscientiousness and knowledge sharing by using the block variable approach. Our study demonstrated that in order to understand the effects of conscientiousness on people’s outcome (in our case, knowledge sha...