The Effect of Organizational Trust andIndividual Motivation on Tacit Knowledge Transfer of Public Library Staff

The tacit knowledge transfer is an interactive process based on trust between the parties. Individual motivation seems to be effective in increasing staff's willingness to transfer tacit knowledge. Accordingly, the current research studied the effect of organizational trust and the mediating role of individual motivation on the willingness to transfer tacit knowledge among public library staff.

The current research is applied based on the purpose and descriptive in terms of the data collection method. The statistical population includes all the employees of the public libraries in Fars province in 2021 (350 people), which by Cochran's formula, 142 people were selected as the statistical sample. To collect data, Fuller (2018)'s Organizational Trust Questionnaire and Individual Motivation Questionnaire were used. In order to investigate the effect of organizational trust on individual motivation and tacit knowledge transfer, confirmatory factor analysis and partial least squares technique have been used. The software used for data analysis are SPSS and PLS software.

The results show that the effect of organizational trust on the desire to transfer tacit knowledge is 0.390. The effect of organizational trust on personal motivation of employees is 0.798 and the effect of individual motivation of employees on the desire to transfer tacit knowledge is 0.437. Therefore, organizational trust and individual motivation have a direct positive and significant effect on the desire to transfer tacit knowledge of employees. But the indirect effect of organizational trust on the tendency to transfer tacit knowledge due to individual motivation is 0.349, which has decreased compared to the direct state.These results show that employees' individual motivation has a moderate effect of organizational trust on the desire to transfer tacit knowledge.

Although organizational trust and individual motivation each have a direct positive and significant effect on the desire to transfer tacit knowledge of public library staff, the mediating role of individual motivation has not increased the effect of organizational trust on the desire to transfer tacit knowledge. Therefore, individual motivation cannot be considered as an effective mediating variable in the process of effective tacit knowledge transfer.