It's Not "Just" Validation: The Effect of Organizational Justice on Contributions to a Knowledge Repository

The value of an electronic knowledge repository depends on the degree to which it offers high quality knowledge to its users. Consequently, firms that use such repositories often implement validation procedures to monitor and ensure the quality of submitted content. However, if perceived as unreasonable or unfair, validation can have the unintended effect of discouraging employee contributions. Drawing on literature in knowledge sharing and organizational justice, we develop hypotheses about how various dimensions of perceived justice of validation procedures influence employees' perceptions of knowledge quality within the repository and their knowledge contributions to it. Analysis of survey data collected at a large North American technical support company reveals that both quality perceptions and contribution behaviors are positively influenced by perceived procedural justice of validation, but not by perceived informational or interpersonal justice. We conclude by discussing implications of these results for knowledge management research and practice.

1. Introduction

In today's knowledge-driven economy, the competitive necessity of managing knowledge assets has prompted many firms to implement information technology-based knowledge repositories (KRs) to capture, store and disseminate relevant knowledge throughout the organization. However, though a KR offers many potential enhancements to knowledge management processes, its value ultimately depends on whether it contains knowledge that is accurate and valuable to the individuals who use it [53], [42]. Getting high quality knowledge into the KR requires two steps: First, knowledge must be contributed, a task usually performed by members of the community that utilize it as a knowledge source [15], [51]. Second, the contributed knowledge must be validated to ensure its accuracy, as a KR that contains incomplete, specious, or flawed information offers little value and will quickly be abandoned [48].