Knowledge Seeking and Anonymity in Digital Work Settings

Abstract

Employees often need knowledge from colleagues to complete tasks successfully. With distributed and remote work becoming more common, organizations increasingly rely on digital technologies, such as organizational platforms, to support members’ knowledge exchange. We study factors that hinder employees from seeking knowledge from others on such platforms. We argue that individuals’ seeking decisions depend on expected social-psychological costs and economic considerations and posit that both can be muted by anonymizing seekers. In two experiments, we test our conjectures and find that both types of expected costs reduce knowledge seeking. Social-psychological costs decrease individuals’ knowledge seeking, while adding economic costs further reduces seeking. Moreover, in digital settings, female knowledge seekers are more sensitive to their identity being known than males and thus benefit more from anonymity.

Keywords: knowledge seeking; search costs; knowledge exchange platforms; anonymity; lab experiment; survey experiment; virtual work; knowledge work