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Knowledge sharing generates opportunities for an organization to maximize its capabilities and produces solutions and efficiencies that provide a business with a competitive advantage (Reid, 2003). Knowledge sharing can be defined as a social interaction culture, encompassing the exchange of employee knowledge, experiences, and skills within the entire department or across various departments of the organization. Knowledge sharing embraces a set of shared understandings that are related to providing employees, access to relevant information and developing and leveraging knowledge networks within organizations (Hogel et al., 2003). Moreover, knowledge sharing occurs at the individual and organizational levels. From an individual employee perspective, knowledge sharing is communicating to other fellow colleagues to help them perform something better, more effectively, or more efficiently. At an organization level, knowledge sharing is capturing, organizing, reusing, and transferring experience-based knowledge that resides within and making that knowledge available to others in the business. Many a number of prior researches, have demonstrated that knowledge sharing is indispensable to organizations, because it supports them to enhance their innovation performance and cut down redundant learning efforts (Calantone et al., 2002; Scarbrough, 2003).
Knowledge is experience or information that can be transferred or disseminated. Knowledge, while made up of data and information, can be regarded of as much greater understanding of relationships, a situation, causal phenomena, and the rules and theories (both explicit and implicit) that underlie a given domain or problem. It is part of every business process. Therefore, the organizations in IT industry are supposed to build strengths and break barriers in establishing the participative environment of knowledge sharing to increase their efficiency and be more proactive in delivering utmost quality of work. Also IT corporates need to unearth the exact mechanisms by which knowledge and learning are institutionalized and embedded in corporate memory. They can successfully foster a knowledge sharing culture not only by promptly incorporating knowledge in its business strategy, but also by influencing positive employee attitudes and behaviors that will encourage willingness to share knowledge and be consistent in sharing knowledge (Connelly and Kelloway, 2003 & Lin and Lee, 2004). Furthermore, several past researches focused on the relationship between knowledge sharing enablers and processes (Van den Hooff and Van Weenen, 2004a, 2004b; Bock et al., 2005; Yeh et al., 2006), while others have focused on the relationship between knowledge sharing enablers and innovation performance (Calantone et al., 2002 & Syed-Ikhsan and Rowland, 2004).
However, there is inadequacy of empirical evidences that support and strengthen the critical concepts in ICT and Knowledge Sharing areas. This paper is targeted at empirically evaluating ICT as a key enabler of knowledge sharing through Social Media in IT industry. The research model that was followed is depicted in Figure 1.