No Face, No Name, No Shame? Overcoming Barriers to Intra-Organizational Public Knowledge-Seeking

While organizational platforms are becoming more prevalent for the integration and exchange of organizational knowledge, employee engagement remains a barrier for the success of these platforms. Extending socio-technical systems (STS) research, we focus on individual knowledge seeking in an organizational platform context. We follow a cost-benefit approach and argue that individual knowledge seeking is influenced by (a) economic cost concerns and (b) psychological cost considerations. To test our theoretical arguments, we run a lab experiment altering the costs associated with individuals' decision to seek knowledge on the platform. While knowledge seeking is lowest in settings with both economic and psychological costs, we observe significant increases by (a) eliminating economic consequences, and (b) removing social psychological cost considerations by inducing anonymity on the platform. In addition, our results suggest the presence of gender-related differences in knowledge-seeking behavior on organizational platforms: Male participants are chiefly discouraged by economic considerations, while females place more emphasis on social considerations. Our results highlight the facilitating role of platform anonymity on employee engagement and have implications for the efficient design of these platforms