Cross-national differences in individual knowledge-seeking patterns: a climato-economic contextualization

Electronic Knowledge Repository (EKR) is one of the most commonly deployed knowledge management technologies, yet its success hinges upon employees’ continued use and is further complicated in today’s multinational context. We integrate multiple theoretical linkages into a research model, conceptualizing knowledge-seeking as an instrumental behavior, adopting the technology acceptance model to characterize the individual-level continued EKR knowledge-seeking behavioral model, and drawing on the climato-economic theory to explain cross-national behavioral differences. Using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), we test the model with data from 1352 randomly sampled knowledge workers across 30 nations. We find that two national-level factors, climate harshness and national wealth, interactively moderate the individual-level relationship between perceived usefulness (PU) and behavioral intention (BI) to continue seeking knowledge from EKR, such that the difference in the strength of this relationship is larger between poor-harsh and poor-temperate nations than between rich-harsh and rich-temperate nations. We find similar cross-level cross-national differences for the link between perceived ease of use (PEOU) and PU but not for the link between PEOU and BI. Implications for research and practice are discussed.