3. The research setting and method
The paper aims to contribute to understanding of the motivational factors and barriers
regarding knowledge sharing through an intra-organizational social media platform, and
whether these factors differ from those concerning knowledge sharing in general. The
problem was approached by collecting data as a case study research from two
companies in the early stages of adopting social media for internal knowledge sharing
purposes. The data gathered from the companies were joint and analyzed as a single
data set.
Taking the organizational knowledge sharing culture and the motivational factors of
participating as a starting point three sets of questions were elaborated. Those questions
were:
Q1. Does the organizational culture of the case companies set barriers for knowledge
sharing?
Q2. What would motivate the employees to share knowledge through a social media
platform?
Q3. What would impede the employees to share knowledge through a social media
platform?
In order to answer these questions it was necessary to have the case companies’ employees
themselves as data sources. The perspective of the study is therefore that of the employees,
although the answers enlighten also the companies’ overall situation, as described by the
employees.
The data was gathered using a web questionnaire which was considered as a suitable
technique considering the objectives of the study: the aim was to reach a large group of
people in a rather short period of time, and to find out averages, majorities and an overall
picture (Ghauri and Grønhaug, 2005). The questionnaire was available via case companies’
intranet for two weeks in February 2010. Anyone who had access to the intranet had the
theoretical opportunity to answer the questionnaire. In practice only those who actually saw
the announcement in the intranet ever had the chance to actually participate, and so the
questionnaire used non-random sampling (Kehoe and Pitkow, 1996).
The problem with online questionnaires is that the response rate cannot usually be
calculated accurately (see e.g. Kaye and Johnson, 1999; Couper, 2000; Bowen et al., 2009).
The information about the amount of people who visited the company intranet (and
subsequently had the chance to notice the request to answer the questionnaire) during the
time the questionnaire was open for answering was not available. Hence, the response rate
(rr) was calculated as suggested by Eysenbach and Wyatt (2002) and Kaye and Johnson
(1999) as follows: