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The purpose of this study is to get an understanding regarding the clusters of middle management employees on the basis of their knowledge sharing behaviour. Designing knowledge sharing behaviors with a distinct focus for a specified group of employees can be an effective and productive one. As it is often argued that the cluster of employees labeled as “middle management” is the key player for knowledge sharing behaviors – a subject of this study that intends to contribute to management strategy to enhance organizational effectiveness and subsequently to its knowledge sharing phenomona.

Cluster analysis was adopted as key tool as a part of quantitative method to accumulate the data from 597 employees who are working within the middle management of service sector located in the union territory of India named Jammu and Kashmir.

Three distinct segments namely – “knowledge sharing adepts (KSA),” “knowledge sharing scrupulous (KSC)” and “knowledge sharing servitudes (KSE)” as the prime domains of knowledge sharing behavior are identified.

To draw a narrow focus, the study was limited to the service sector of a union territory in India, hence the findings may not be generalized. Furthermore, as knowledge sharing behavior of individuals is always evolved out of social and historical practices, findings of this cross-sectional study should ideally be needed to be updated time to time through further research.

Cluster dynamicism of knowledge sharing behavior based on the differentiated and specified group of employee functions distinctly which in turn increases the organizational productivity with a particular focus on the mid-management of the service sector – a key managerial implication of this study.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research paper is the first of its kind in Jammu and Kashmir adding value to the international literature in the area of knowledge sharing behaviors of service sector.

Sharing of knowledge has always been accredited as the indispensable segment of knowledge management. As knowledge management practices are growing within the organizations, it is important that correspondingly, valid and reliable knowledge sharing behavior scales are developed to avoid validation issues. Therefore, this composition describes the development and validation of multi-dimensional tacit knowledge sharing behavior scale.

Herein, two analytical techniques, namely, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis have been used to derive the composition of the constructs.

The study proposes four-dimensional tacit knowledge sharing behavior scale for services which include voluntarily tacit knowledge donation, involuntary tacit knowledge collection, involuntarily tacit knowledge collection and voluntary tacit knowledge collection.

A more holistic approach to the tacit knowledge sharing behavior construct has been proposed, which is helpful in contributing to the literature of tacit knowledge sharing behavior of employees. Additionally, it has made an attempt to eliminate the gap as voiced by most of the literature related to tacit knowledge sharing in service industries which has focused upon western service sectors and limited research is available in the Asian context.

The ingenuity of the scale lies in the fact that it measures voluntary and involuntary aspects of tacit knowledge sharing behavior of employees which can be used by the organization to develop knowledge management plans and knowledge sharing practices based on the identified strategies.

The study is one of its kind that has considered various aspects namely, knowledge donation, knowledge collection, voluntary knowledge sharing and involuntary knowledge sharing together.