How does mobile social media affect knowledge sharing under the “Guanxi” system?

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of mobile social media functions on explicit and implicit knowledge sharing under the “Guanxi” system based on the framework of stimulus–organism–response (SOR).

Combined with Guanxi theory, this paper designs an experiment to collect data from the new product development (NPD) teams.

Interestingly, the results show that the effect of social media communication function on employees is greater than the impact of collaboration on employees. Specifically, on the one hand, the more employees communicate in social media, the better their feelings will be, the less they will share knowledge. On the other hand, the collaboration function has a significantly negative impact on the psychological factors of employees. Excessively close cooperation and contact may instead create a contradiction between the employees, which is not conducive to the occurrence of knowledge sharing.

This paper extends SOR framework by combining Guanxi theory to examine the relationship between social media functions and knowledge sharing behavior (KSB). In practical, companies should pay attention to the frequency of employee using social media when it is introduced for NPD teams to control the negative influence of social media functions on employee KSB.