Understanding social loafing in knowledge contribution from the perspectives of justice and trust

Many studies have confirmed that social loafing can greatly undermine a group’s performance. The negative impact of social loafing is even more pronounced in knowledge contribution, since much valuable knowledge is implicit and thus easy to conceal. However, few studies have centered on investigating the effect of social loafing on knowledge contribution, namely, knowledge contribution loafing (KCL). The aim of this study is to develop an integrative understanding of major KCL antecedents in team projects. We employ as our theoretical framework the widely applied Social Exchange Theory (SET) and focus on two of its core concepts, trust and justice, each of which is in turn sub-divided into three types to facilitate a more comprehensive understanding. Through a cross-industry survey of 157 groups in Taiwan and after a partial least squares (PLS) analysis, the result of this study shows that KCL can be effectively diminished by raising interactional justice and benevolence-based trust. Additionally, we find that procedural, interactional and distributive justice as well as integrity-based trust also exert a positive effect on boosting benevolence-based trust.