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1. Introduction
Knowledge sharing (KS) and knowledge transfer (KT) associated researches are no longer new in the field of knowledge management (KM). The significance of effective KM and its associations to organization’s effectiveness and performance quality (Borges, 2013) made the entire KM field became very popular among scholars and human resource development (HRD) practitioners (Al-Alawi et al., 2007). Within the field, enormous focuses have been given to develop KS and KT models because they are the key processes to enable knowledge transmission from one member to another, which will eventually lead to individual career success (Mohd Rasdi et al., 2012). Having said that voluminous numbers of KS and KT models were found available in the literature (Liyanage et al., 2009; Tangaraja et al., 2015; Welschen et al., 2012). These models highlight a list of enablers that are claimed to be able to foster either KS or KT in the specified context. However, the extent to which the enablers were actually able to explain the concepts and achieve the intended research objectives as set has to be probed further because there is confusion in the literature due to the blurriness of the concepts (Paulin and Suneson, 2012).
An extensive literature review provides evidences that the terms KS and KT were used interchangeably by some KM researchers (Kumar and Ganesh, 2009). Liyanage et al. (2009) have exposed that KS and KT were discussed together at times because of lack of clarity about the concepts in the literature. Paulin and Suneson (2012) have acknowledged such misconception and, in fact, have produced an applauded work by attempting to distinguish the differences. This is discussed in the later section.
Among the researchers who have such misconceptions are, for example, Cruz et al. (2009), Al-Alawi et al. (2007) and Hsu and Wang (2008) to name a few. For example, Cruz et al. (2009) have equated KT with KS. As it was explicitly mentioned in their paper that “managers should encourage their employees to transfer knowledge as a means to enhance their organisations’ efficiency” (p. 478), indicates that transfer in this work was indeed regarded as sharing. In fact, the authors also termed KT as “knowledge transfer behaviour” (p. 479), which clearly indicates the misconception of...