مشاوره رشد، تعهد سازمانی عاطفی و اشتراک دانش در شرکت های حسابداری دولتی Developmental mentoring, affective organizational commitment, and knowledge sharing in public accounting firms

Introduction A persistent challenge facing organizations, especially public accounting firms1 , is encouraging employees to share their knowledge with others at work. Knowledge is a critical organizational resource (Wang and Noe, 2010, p.115), which leads to “superior firm innovation capability” (Lin, 2007, p. 315), making it one of the most important resources for competitive advantage in organizations (Pan and Scarbrough, 1998). DeLong (2004) explains that knowledge lost due to an aging and more mobile workforce is a serious threat to knowledge-based organizations’ continued success and sustainability, while the creation and application of new knowledge is also essential to the survival of almost all businesses (Gurteen, 1999). Knowledge sharing (KS), the willingness of individuals in an organization to share with others the knowledge they have acquired or created (Gibbert and Krause, 2002), has been proposed as a means for leveraging the skills, knowledge, and best practices possessed by individuals across organizations, and is especially important in accounting firms, as these service firms depend on the quality of services provided by their professionals to succeed. Too often, people assume that knowledge2 exists freely and will be captured and shared as a component of professionalism (Fernie, et al. 2003). However, knowledge and expertise are distributed unevenly among employees, and individuals’ knowledge does not transform automatically or easily into organizational knowledge. Thus, it must be willingly shared to become available to others. Knowledge sharing is defined here as the deliberate act in which knowledge is made reusable through its transfer from one party to another (Lee and AlHawamdeh, 2002). It is an enabler of organizational productivity and innovation, and can help organizations leverage the skills, knowledge, and best practices of their professional staff (Thatchenkery, 2005). This study focuses on knowledge that cannot be or has not become stored within a generally accessible organizational database, since it has been asserted that 90 percent of the knowledge in any organization is embedded and synthesized in people’s heads (Wah, 1999; Bonner, 2000).