Contribution of Social Media Use at Work to Social Capital and Knowledge Sharing: A Comparison between Chinese and Thai Employees

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to explore the relationship between social media use at work and knowledge sharing behavior. This study will also do a comparative study between China and Thailand. Social capital was introduced as a mediating variable. To further study, this study selected trust, social networking, and shared language to represent the three aspects of social capital. Convenient sampling was employed to collect data from the multinational corporations; partial least square regression was used in analyzing the data. After analyzing, positive relationship between social media use at work and all mediating variables (trust, social networking and shared language) was discovered. However, the positive relationship between mediating variables and knowledge sharing is different according to the different culture. By the means of this article, the cross-culture analysis illustrates the difference between Thai and Chinese employees’ knowledge sharing behavior, which provides an empirical evidence for corporations to build a culture-based social media use policy.