Job Satisfaction and Knowledge Sharing among Computer and Information Science Faculty Members : A Case of Malaysian Universities

Job satisfaction and knowledge sharing are the topics which have gained the attraction of researchers and practitioners over the years. These two areas have great importance for the overall well-being of an organization. This study explored the relation between job satisfaction dimensions and knowledge sharing behaviour. Job satisfaction dimensions were adapted from Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire. Knowledge sharing was categorized as explicit knowledge donation, explicit knowledge collection, implicit knowledge donation and implicit knowledge collection. Data was collected from Malaysian universities and only CIS academicians were requested to participate in the study. Faculty members from Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Universiti Teknnology Mara, Universiti Malaya and Multimedia Univesiti participated in the study. Questionnaire method was used to collect data and both online, hard-copy methods were used. Results showed that data was highly reliable. Company policies and practices, achievement, recognition, co-workers and moral values are the factors which showed significant correlations with various categories of knowledge sharing.


INTRODUCTION
An adequate amount of research has already been done on knowledge sharing, knowledge transfer or knowledge exchange but still there is room to fill the gap between unexplored areas (gray areas) of knowledge sharing.Besides the existence of vast literature on knowledge sharing and the willingness of an individual motivation to share, this topic still remains unexplored and poorly understood (Osterloh et al., 2002;Milne, 2007).As knowledge resides in the minds of human so there are numerous factors which can hinder human minds and can cause hesitation for knowledge sharing.
Considering that this topic is unexplored and poorly understood, this study will look at knowledge sharing through the glasses of job satisfaction as it is considered one of the most important areas for employees (Akfopure et al., 2006) at all levels of management.Thus study will focus that how job satisfaction impacts knowledge sharing among Computer and Information Science (CIS) faculty members.Rationale for selecting academicians and specifically from CIS department is that very limited studies have been done on job satisfaction of academicians (Stevens, 2005) plus due to rapid development in Information Technology (IT), importance of CIS and IT faculty members is increasing day by day.As it has been one of the most rapidly changing fields thus it is crucial to provide job satisfaction to those who provide training and education in this field.Among them the educationists are the forerunners.Rapid development in IT was also mentioned by Lee (1999) in which it was concluded that: "Few professions in human history have seen such rapid changes in their knowledge base and work requirements as the field of IS today.These changes are driven not just by the unprecedented amount of new technical knowledge … but also by the changing business environment … and the changing role of IS within organizations".
Academicians while dissatisfied may not properly perform which can lead to lower job performance (Awang et al., 2010) and knowledge sharing.If they do not share their newly obtained knowledge (related to changes in technology) with their colleagues then students will suffer who in future will have to contribute towards the economy of the country.Thus dissatisfied faculty members may not only create problems for their school, college or university, ultimately their dissatisfaction will lead to poor economy of the country.Therefore it is important to come up with those factors which help academicians to share their knowledge based on job satisfaction dimensions.
Over the years, researchers have determined many components of job satisfaction and knowledge sharing but still this process is continued.Very few studies have been done which extensively explore the relationship between job satisfaction and knowledge sharing or vice versa in the field of academics.Therefore as pointed by Almahamid et al. (2010), that relationship between knowledge sharing practices and job satisfaction needs to empirically explore thus current paper will look in to the relationship between job satisfaction and knowledge sharing behaviour among CIS academicians.

Knowledge sharing:
The view that physical assets help to maintain competitive advantage started to vanish from economic scene when Knowledge Management (KM) started to emerge.The asset, which is being considered crucial for competitive advantage, is now knowledge and businesses are looking towards it to maintain their advantage (Davenport and Prusak, 1998;Drucker, 1999).The reason for its importance and to become a source of competitive advantage is that physical assets lose their value or depreciate upon usage whereas in case of knowledge it loses its value when it is not in use (Sveiby, 2001).Thus it is a win-win situation for both parties (knowledge donator and receiver).KM helps an organization to increase innovation and performance (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995).It also benefits individuals and groups (Reid, 2003).However management of knowledge is not an easy task and is considered as one of the uphill tasks organizations face (Davenport and Prusak, 1998;Drucker, 1993;Hansen, 1999).
One of the key elements of KM is knowledge sharing.Knowledge sharing is the process in which an individual shares his/her knowledge with others.This knowledge is based either on the expertise and skills of that individual, which he/she has possessed over a period of time, or it can also be acquired from other published sources.The one which is based on skills or experiences is called implicit/tacit knowledge, on the other hand the one which is gained through some published document, or is documented or codified somewhere, is known as explicit knowledge (Bollinger and Smith, 2001).
Knowledge sharing involves two parties.One is called knowledge supplier and the other is knowledge demander (Ardichvill et al., 2003).These two parties can also be referred as "knowledge source" and "knowledge receiver" (Weggeman, 2000) or "knowledge carrier" and "knowledge requester" (Oldenkamp, 2001).This emphasizes that to make knowledge sharing, both parties should be willing to send or receive knowledge.If knowledge sender is hesitant to share knowledge then knowledge receiver will suffer and ultimately team, department and organization.Similarly, if knowledge receiver is not ready to accept new knowledge due to any reason then the above mentioned units will suffer.Thus organizations should encourage its employees more and more to share and receive new knowledge.
Job satisfaction: Literature on job satisfaction can be found as old as 75 years like the work done by Hoppock (1935).Since then, an ample amount of work has been done on job satisfaction.There are numerous reasons to that.For example, work is the only activity which takes majority of our time on daily basis (Koustelios, 2001) additionally; job satisfaction also has an impact on productivity and turnover (Baron, 1986;Maghradi, 1999) which are two focus areas for any organization.Importance of job satisfaction can be analyzed from the findings of Granny et al. (1992) in which they stated that more than five-thousand studies have been published on this topic.So much in depth research on this area is due to the belief of practitioners and academicians that job satisfied workers are more productive as compared to dissatisfied ones (Sarker et al., 2003).
Job satisfaction can be defined as "a pleasurable or positive emotional state, resulting from the appraisal of one's job experience" (Locke, 1976).Simply stating, it is the difference between what an individual is expecting from his/her job and what job is delivering.
Individual's expectations from job <= Job's supply of individual's expectation = Job Satisfaction (1) Individual's expectations from job>Job's supply of individual's expectation = Job Dissatisfaction (2) These expectations can be subjective.i.e., they might vary on individual basis.Numerous surveys have been developed so far to measure job satisfaction.Like the one, developed by Hackman and Oldham (1974) measures job satisfaction and contains pay, promotion, co-workers attitude and supervisory.Another survey to measure job satisfaction is Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ) which was developed by Weiss et al. (1967) and is one of the comprehensive measurement instruments for job satisfaction.It measures an individual's satisfaction on 20 aspects.Components which have been used for measuring job satisfaction includes activity (Weiss et al., 1967), ability utilization (Weiss et al., 1967), authority (Weiss et al., 1967), good relations with co-workers (Hackman and Oldham, 1974;Weiss et al., 1967;Awang et al., 2010), independence (Weiss et al., 1967), moral values (Weiss et al., 1967), recognition (Weiss et al., 1967), promotion (Awang et al., 2010), workload (Awang et al., 2010).
Job satisfaction among academicians: Teachers are generally satisfied with their job itself and supervision however they are not satisfied with the promotion and pay aspects (Koustelios, 2001).Similarly another study by Oshagbemi (1999) concluded that UK academicians are generally satisfied with their job (teaching), physical or working conditions and supervision whereas they are not satisfied with their present pay and promotion.Saif-ud-Din et al. (2010) concluded in a study done on academicians from Pakistan that junior lecturers have less job satisfaction as compare to their seniors.And females have also less job satisfaction than their male colleagues.This study revealed that demography is also a factor which can cause job satisfaction/dissatisfaction among academicians.
Lacy and Sheehan (1997) conducted a study in which they compared the job satisfaction among academicians of different nations.They concluded that academicians from eight countries, which were included in the study, are generally satisfied with their jobs.Faculty members from USA were most satisfied based on their study results.Respondents from all participating countries were satisfied with their relationship with co-workers, job security, freedom to use their own ideas and job as a whole.On the other hand dissatisfaction factors include promotional opportunities and "environment ('climate' or 'atmosphere')".Another conclusion on which they reached was the difference in level of job satisfaction.They found that male academicians have more job satisfaction than their female colleagues.

Knowledge
sharing among academicians: "Continuous professional development" is mandatory for teachers (Hew and Hara, 2007).This is because of the rapid change in technology and extensive research on almost every aspect of life.For this, knowledge sharing can help academicians to improve their knowledge but studies reveal that teachers are not willing to share their knowledge (Carroll et al., 2003).This may be due to the reason that academicians do not have to depend on each other like in corporate sector.Their jobs are independent of each other so they might not communicate due to lack of interaction (Darling-Hammond and Ball, 1998).This lack of interaction can cause several other problems which hinder knowledge sharing.For example, lack of interaction will lead to less informal communication, which will lead to lack of trust and thus creating situation that cause less knowledge sharing.Hew and Hara (2007) conducted a study on motivators and barriers of online knowledge sharing for teachers.In this study they concluded that the following factors act as "motivators and barriers to knowledge sharing".
Barriers: Lack of knowledge (reported by 7 teachers), lack of time (reported by 7 teachers), technology (reported by 4 teachers), negative attitude of seeker and might backfire (reported by 1 teacher).
Job satisfaction and knowledge sharing: Enough literature does not exist on the nature of relationship between knowledge sharing and job satisfaction.As stated in a study done by Almahamid et al. (2010) in which they examined the relationships between knowledge sharing practices, employee adaptability, employee learning behaviour and job satisfaction.Study says that the relationship between these factors is not mature yet (at "infancy" level) and therefore there is a need to theoretically and empirically explore the nature of relationship between these factors.
Despite less number of studies on knowledge sharing and job satisfaction, those studies which explored this relationship showed a positive correlation between these two factors.Like, Almahamid et al. (2010) concluded that a positive significant correlation exists between knowledge sharing practices, employee learning commitment, employee adaptability and job satisfaction.Pascoe et al. (2002) did a study in three settings which are tactical headquarters, a single service strategic headquarters; and a joint services strategic headquarters.Their study was based on this assumption that companies invest heavily on IT to reduce the impact of knowledge loss (due to turnover) but with seldom success.They say that this is because of less understanding about those factors which might increase/decrease knowledge sharing.For this reason a factor which is of particular importance for them was "employees' motivation to come up with new and better ways of working, their willingness to voice and discuss innovative ideas and their willingness, generally, to share information and corporate knowledge with their organizational colleagues".In their study they found that job satisfaction and morale, motivates an employee to work well which in return has a positive impact on the willingness of an employees to share knowledge.Rehman et al. (2010) reviewed factors affecting knowledge sharing behaviour.They also showed an indirect link between knowledge sharing behaviour and job satisfaction.Their study stated that job satisfaction impacts affective organizational commitment and latter has an impact on knowledge sharing behaviour.Based on literature, following hypotheses will be tested:

METHODOLOGY
Instrument selection and designing: Questionnaire method was opted to collect data.Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ) long-form (Weiss et al. (1967) was adapted to measure different aspects of job satisfaction while knowledge sharing (knowledge collection and donation) was measured by adopting the items from Reychav and Weisberg (2009).Items for job satisfaction were measured on 5 likert scale where 1 corresponds to very dissatisfied and 5 to very satisfied.Similarly, knowledge sharing items were also measured on 5 likert scale.1-strongly disagree to 5-strongly agree.MSQ is a multi dimensional instrument and it was used because multiple-item instrument is more reliable as compare to single-item measure.Managers would like to use multiple-item measure as it helps to mention the strengths and weaknesses as well which single-item instrument do not (Oshagbemi, 1999).Job satisfaction was measured through the following items: Ability utilization, achievement, activity, advancement, authority, company policies as used because and practices, compensation, co-workers, creativity, independence, moral values, recognition, responsibility, security, social service, social status, supervision-human relation, variety and working conditions.Knowledge sharing was categorized into explicit knowledge donation, explicit knowledge collection, implicit knowledge donation and implicit knowledge collection.
Instrument modifications: Before sending the questionnaire to the actual respondents, researcher requested few personnel (academicians) to go through the items and suggest changes, if any, according to Malaysian culture.These suggestions were based on difficulty level of language or wording used in the actual questionnaire.Due to this, ten items were removed from MSQ as they were reported to be repeating by the understanding of feedback providers.One factor Supervision-Technical from MSQ was not included in the questionnaire because in academics there is no need for this dimension of job satisfaction.As faculty members do not need technical training like the corporate people need from their boss.

Instrument
distribution and respondents: Questionnaire was distributed manually and a copy was available online as well.Respondents could access that  (Cortina, 1993).

RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
Descriptive statistics: Almost equal number of participants (male and female) participated in the survey.Female accounts for 50.6% of the total number of respondents while male represents 49.4 % (N = 45 for female and 44 for male).Twenty-seven percent respondents were doing their job on contract basis whereas 73% were permanent employees of their respective institutes (N = 24 for contract and 65 for permanent).Majority of the respondents were experienced as they had more than 10 years of experience (50.6%) while few respondents (10.1%) had less than two years of experience.Lecturers contribute to 46.1% of the total sample, senior lecturers 37.1%, associate professors 11.2% and professors 5.6%.Table 1 provides a summarized detail about the information of respondents.
Reliability and item analysis: Cronbach Alpha was used to measure the internal consistency of the items as it provides good estimate of reliability (Nunally and Bernstein, 1994).Results showed that data is highly reliable as value for Cronbach alpha is 0.873.Item analysis was also conducted.On the basis of item analysis, three factors namely, authority, variety and working condition were removed from further analysis 0.659 Items which increased the Cronbach alpha value were removed.Those factors whose value was less than 0.70 were also not included in the results as they do not met the criteria to qualify item analysis.Table 2 shows the Cronbach value if item deleted plus the Cronbach alpha value for each factor.Alpha values for factors ranged from 0.706 to 0.913.Hence all the factors included in the analysis had good reliability.3 summarizes the mean value of every factor and the standard deviation.
Hypotheses testing: Multiple model regression method (Hair Jr et al., 1998) was used to analyze the hypotheses.Every dimension of job satisfaction (adapted 19 factors from MSQ, 3 were removed during item analysis) taken from MSQ was treated as independent variable.Dependent variables were explicit knowledge donation, explicit knowledge collection, implicit knowledge donation and implicit knowledge collection.Sixteen factors of MSQ job satisfaction (independent variable) were first tested with explicit knowledge donation (dependent variable) and then with explicit knowledge collection (dependent), implicit knowledge donation (dependent) and implicit knowledge collection (dependent) separately.

Job satisfaction and explicit knowledge donation:
Table 4 shows the model fitness between independent variables and explicit knowledge donation as dependent factor.Model is reliable as F (89, 16) = 3.358 and p<0.05.
Correlation value 'R' is 0.654 whereas R-square is 0.427.This shows that 42.7% of variation in explicit knowledge donation can be explained by independent factors.But out of these 16 factors of job satisfaction, only five factors, namely achievement, company policies and practices, recognition activity and responsibility, have significant correlation with explicit knowledge donation as p<0.05 for these factors.This also suggests that H 01 is rejected.Appendix A gives detailed information about the significance level of every independent factor on dependent.

Job satisfaction and explicit knowledge collection:
Table 5 is about the multiple regressions between 16 job satisfaction dimensions and explicit knowledge collection.R-square value is 0.522 which shows that 52.2% variance in the dependent variable (in this case explicit knowledge collection) is explained by independent variables.Correlation value 'R' is also high (R = 0.723).Thus model is suitable to use as F (89, 16) = 4.917 and p = 0.000<0.05.Based on p-value our hypothesis H 02 is rejected.On the other hand, only two factors of job satisfaction have significant correlation with explicit knowledge collection as their p-values are less than 0.05.Factors which have significant correlation are company policies and practices and coworkers.Appendix B shows the correlation of every factor on dependent variable.

Job satisfaction and implicit knowledge donation:
Table 6 summarizes the results of correlation between job satisfaction dimensions and implicit knowledge donation.Model shows that 42.7% variation in the dependent variable (implicit knowledge donation) can be predicted by independent variables.Correlation is also high at 'R' = 0.654.Thus model seems to be good at F (89, 16) = 3.358 and p<0.05 and rejecting hypothesis H 03 .Five factors have significant correlation with

DISCUSSION
CIS academicians from Malaysian universities scored higher on independence and moral values.Academicians normally have to work alone as compare to industrial employees whose work or output becomes the input for other employees.Thus their output or work depends on the performance of others.Whereas in case of academicians, they have to work alone and their performance is solely based on their own work.Another factor which scored high was moral values.In this study, moral values was referred to ethics or beliefs (Weiss et al., 1967) and the reason might be that as the respondents are from CIS department which means they are teaching technical subjects and technology has nothing to do with beliefs.Some other factors which scored high for job satisfaction includes social service, achievement, security and co-workers.These findings are consistent with the studies previously done in the field of academics.For example, Eyupoglu and Saner (2009) study results showed that teachers are motivated more through intrinsic factors rather than extrinsic.As moral values, social service, social status is intrinsic in nature so results of this study also strengthen the previous literature.Interestingly, compensation was not included as a major satisfactory factor by respondents.In a study done by Oshagbemi (1999), pay was also not an important factor contributing towards job satisfaction.Thus it can be concluded that those factors which are intrinsic in nature, play more contributing role for the satisfaction of academicians rather than extrinsic factors.
People may prefer to collect and share explicit knowledge if it helps them to grow more in their organizations and due to sharing, they might get recognition.Besides, if company adopts a policy in which everybody has to share then knowledge sharing will increase in the organization and thus knowledge received will also increase.At the same time, if company policies are made in such a way that employees feel knowledge sharing to be their responsibility instead of an enforced object or policy, this will also help to improve the level of knowledge sharing in the organization.These results are consistent with the results of prior research in which it was concluded that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation helps to enhance knowledge contribution (Horie and Ikawa, 2007).In current study recognition, company policies and practices and achievement can be categorized into intrinsic and extrinsic motivating factors and they have an impact on explicit knowledge donation and collection as mentioned in the results.
Relationship with colleagues is an important factor for implicit knowledge collection and donation behaviour.Good working relationship with co-workers increases the level of communication and trust which ultimately enhances the mutual understanding.And if employees have good level of understanding then there are more possibilities of knowledge sharing.Employees may also collect or donate the knowledge they have, to get recognition in the organization or to grow if advancement criteria takes knowledge sharing behaviour into consideration.Therefore advancement and recognition process in the organization do impact implicit knowledge donation and collection.

CONCLUSION
This study focused on the job satisfaction dimensions mentioned in MSQ and the knowledge sharing behaviour (both explicit and implicit, collection and donation) of Malaysian academicians from the departments of CIS.Results showed that, company policies and practices, recognition and responsibility had strong correlation with explicit knowledge donation.Company policies and practices and coworkers contributed more towards explicit knowledge collection.Whereas achievement, activity, company policies and practices, recognition and responsibility impacts implicit knowledge donation and responsibility has a correlation with implicit knowledge collection.
This study also has some limitations like less number of respondents and thus results should be carefully generalized.However it will be interesting to see in future studies that whether the factors, which, Malaysian academicians consider important for their job satisfaction and knowledge sharing, are also important for academicians from other nationalities or not.This requires in-depth analysis across various countries in future.
Mean and standard deviation of job satisfaction dimensions among CIS faculty members: CIS faculty members are satisfied mostly with the independence they get from their job and the moral values.Mean values for these two factors are 4.08 and 4.01 respectively.Mean values for creativity (3.97), social service (3.94), achievement (3.88), security (3.84), coworkers (3.82), activity (3.80) and recognition (3.73) are also high as compare to other dimensions of job satisfaction.Table

Table 1 :
Demographic information of respondents

Table 3 :
Job satisfaction level based on different dimensions

Table 4 :
Correlation between job satisfaction and explicit knowledge donation