Analysing lawyers’ attitude towards knowledge sharing

Objectives: The study examined and identified the factors that affect lawyers’ attitudes toknowledge sharing, and their knowledge sharing behaviour. Specifically, it investigated therelationship between the salient beliefs affecting the knowledge sharing attitude of lawyers’,and applied a modified version of the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) in the knowledgesharing context, to predict how these factors affect their knowledge sharing behaviour.Method: A field survey of 273 lawyers was carried out, using questionnaire for data collection.Collected data on all variables were structured into grouped frequency distributions. PrincipalComponent Factor Analysis was applied to reduce the constructs and Simple Regression wasapplied to test the hypotheses. These were tested at 0.05% level of significance.Results: Results showed that expected associations and contributions were the majordeterminants of lawyers’ attitudes towards knowledge sharing. Expected reward was notsignificantly related to lawyers’ attitudes towards knowledge sharing. A positive attitudetowards knowledge sharing was found to lead to a positive intention to share knowledge,although a positive intention to share knowledge did not significantly predict a positiveknowledge sharing behaviour. The level of Information Technology (IT) usage was also foundto significantly affect the knowledge sharing behaviour of lawyers’.Conclusion: It was recommended that law firms in the study area should deploy more ITinfrastructure and services that encourage effective knowledge sharing amongst lawyers.