Study of the relationship between Emotional Intelligence (EI) and Knowledge Sharing (KS)

Abstract

Firms can obtain competitive advantages from their employee’s knowledge sharing behaviors. Due to the importance of knowledge in today’s competitive world, an understanding of how to enhance employee knowledge sharing has become critical. Since employees’ knowledge sharing intentions are one of the strong predictors of actual employee knowledge sharing behavior. This paper presents a descriptive-correlative research to understand the relationship among the emotional intelligence of employees and knowledge sharing in lubricant industry. The hypotheses are tested on data collected from 230 employees of a Lubricant Company in Iran; samples were selected by simple random sampling. The EI and KS questionnaires were used as research instruments and the data was analyzed by “Structural Equation Modeling” by “Lisrel” software. The results showed that there is a meaningful positive relationship between emotional intelligence and knowledge sharing. Limitations of this study and future research directions are also discussed.

Keywords: Emotional intelligence (EI): Knowledge Sharing: Knowledge Exchange