Trust-Building Factors Affecting Organizational Knowledge Sharing: a Delphi Study

Objective: The current research seeks to identify and analyze the most important trust-building factors affecting the sharing of organizational knowledge in the field of knowledge management to provide the basis for proper management and proper planning for managers of organizations.Methodology: The present research was conducted using the methods of Systematic Review and Delphi. The participating experts in Delphi were selected by purposive sampling. The selected experts were professors of information and knowledge science, sociology, and management in university with scientific and research experience in knowledge management and organizational trust. In order to analyze the data, frequency distribution, mean, agreement coefficient, one-sample t-test, and Friedman ranking were used.Findings: The research findings showed that the trust-building factors affecting knowledge sharing could be categorized into six general dimensions, including organizational trust factor, mental norm, and attitude towards knowledge sharing, external motivation, internal motivation, and organizational support. Among the effective factors from the point of view of experts, the factor of organizational trust, with a total Mean of 4.86, has the most impact, and external motivation, with a total Mean of 4.14, has the least impact on knowledge sharing. The effects of the factors on the components of knowledge sharing also showed that the effect of organizational trust on the intention to share knowledge, with an average of 4.91 and a consensus index of 1.9, has the highest average and value of the consensus index, Vice versa, the effect of the external motivation factor on the component Knowledge sharing behavior has the lowest value with an average of 4.09 and a consensus index equal to 1.38. Also, the factor prioritization index results showed that the organizational trust factor has the first rank with a Mean rating of 4.45. After that, the factor of internal motivation and attitude to knowledge sharing with a similar Mean rank equal to 3.77 in the second rank, the factor of organizational support with a Mean rank equal to 3.50 in the third rank, the Mental norm factor with a Mean rank equal to It ranks fourth with 23.3 and external motivation factor ranks fifth with a Mean rating of 2.27.Conclusion: The results showed that for efficient knowledge sharing and creating a dynamic platform, the attention and appropriate policy of managers and knowledge management professionals to imp