Analysing lawyers’ attitude towards knowledge sharing

Abstract

Objectives: The study examined and identified the factors that affect lawyers’ attitudes to knowledge sharing, and their knowledge sharing behaviour. Specifically, it investigated the relationship between the salient beliefs affecting the knowledge sharing attitude of lawyers’, and applied a modified version of the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) in the knowledge sharing context, to predict how these factors affect their knowledge sharing behaviour.

Method: A field survey of 273 lawyers was carried out, using questionnaire for data collection. Collected data on all variables were structured into grouped frequency distributions. Principal Component Factor Analysis was applied to reduce the constructs and Simple Regression was applied to test the hypotheses. These were tested at 0.05% level of significance.

Results: Results showed that expected associations and contributions were the major determinants of lawyers’ attitudes towards knowledge sharing. Expected reward was not significantly related to lawyers’ attitudes towards knowledge sharing. A positive attitude towards knowledge sharing was found to lead to a positive intention to share knowledge, although a positive intention to share knowledge did not significantly predict a positive knowledge sharing behaviour. The level of Information Technology (IT) usage was also found to significantly affect the knowledge sharing behaviour of lawyers’.

Conclusion: It was recommended that law firms in the study area should deploy more IT infrastructure and services that encourage effective knowledge sharing amongst lawyers.