The influence of Thai emotional intelligence on employees’ knowledge sharing attitude in a commercial bank in Thailand

Abstract

Employees are perhaps the most important assets for success to any organization. The knowledge known, grown and shared by motivated employees in a culture nurtured for sharing of that knowledge can raise organizational innovation and performance to superior levels. Knowledge Sharing has become recognized as an important strategy in business. Many organizations invest a lot of effort in implementing sharing practices in order to maintain their competitive advantage by utilizing the best knowledge of their employees. Employees can be motivated to participate in activities to share and collect knowledge to deliver better ideas, and innovate in product and process improvements. However, the actual act of sharing can be influenced positively or negatively by both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation factors. But employees’ attitude toward knowledge sharing contributes one of the most important predictors to actual knowledge sharing behavior; hence the interest in emotional intelligence. Emotional Intelligence (EI) impacts how individuals perceive situations both professionally and personally, and it is also known to be an influential factor in shaping individuals’ attitudes and behaviors. Therefore, it was hypothesized that emotional intelligence would play a major role in stimulating a positive attitude towards knowledge sharing in a Thai Commercial Bank. Financial institutions are a type of organization that continuously responds to higher market performance expectations and demands for new products and services. Consequently, financial institutions, especially commercial banks, have gradually transformed into knowledge-intensive firms. Knowledge within and outside of the organization is gathered and used to enhance overall performance. Achieving elusive, demanding, and effective knowledge sharing has become an important performance parameter in leveraging knowledge as a key intangible asset, yet very little research exists using the constructs exercised in this study. This research provides evidence of how the employees’ emotional intelligence influences a positive attitude towards knowledge sharing. Furthermore, it shows how perceived motivational factors are also positively influenced in their attitude toward knowledge sharing. The hypotheses are tested on data collected from employees of a Thai commercial bank. The research instruments are an emotional intelligence survey tool specifically developed by Thailand’s Department of Mental health, and a knowledge sharing motivation questionnaire on individual and organization factors. SPSS software is used for the descriptive statistics, and relationships among variables are analyzed by structural equation modeling using Lisrel software. The data analysis revealed that the Thai emotional intelligence independent variable has direct, positive influence on employees’ knowledge sharing attitude. Moreover, it also has a positive impact on attitude toward knowledge sharing intrinsic and extrinsic motivation factors inherent in the composition of the dependent variables on individual and organizational motivation. The limitations of this research are the self-reporting instrument, which could have a bias based on the respondents’ honesty and awareness of their feelings. Also, it has been studied with employees in only one of the 14 Thai Commercial Banks. Therefore, recommendations for future research are to develop a more in-depth instrument, and expand the group of respondents to more financial organizations in the 10 country ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) and to a variety of industries/services. Regardless of some limitation of the research, the findings reveal that high emotional intelligence enhances employees’ attitude toward knowledge sharing leading to greater success in actual knowledge sharing behavior in organizations.