The Relationship between Knowledge Sharing and Academic Quality Improvement from the Viewpoints of Faculty Members at Isfahan Selected Universities

Today, process of knowledge sharing is one of the most important strategies for the development and deployment of knowledge management in organizations. Universities and centers of higher education as the most important knowledge-based organizations can improve their academic quality by achieving this important capability, i.e. knowledge sharing. The purpose of this research was to evaluate the structural equation modeling of knowledge sharing upon academic quality improvement from the viewpoints of faculty members at Isfahan selected Universities, Iran.

The research method was descriptive and correlational type. The statistical population consisted of 1472 faculty members of Isfahan selected Universities from wich a sample size of 177 was chosen through stratified random sampling. In order to collect data, the 10-item knowledge sharing questionnaire and a 30-item academic quality improvement questionnaire were used. The questionnaires validity was confirmed through confirmatory factor analysis and their Cronbach alpha coefficient was estimated 0.87 and 0.95 respectively. The analysis of data with using of SPSS16 and Amos18 software were performed.

The findings(correlation coefficient) revealed that there is a positive and significant relationship between knowledge sharing and academic quality improvement (p> 0.01). Also there is positive and significant relationship between knowledge sharing (knowledge donating and knowledge collecting) and academic quality improvement components (p> 0.01). The results from a structural equation modeling approach show that Knowledge sharing has a positive and significant impact on academic quality improvement. In other words, knowledge sharing predicts and explains %35 of academic quality improvement variance.

Universities and centers of higher education can assure and advance their academic quality improvement by development and deployment of knowledge sharing culture.