Task performance and social information seeking

Abstract

Employees' information seeking behavior is an important aspect of knowledge management. However, the extant literature has dominantly focused on information sharing and transfer. The limited literature on information seeking has taken a social network perspective as a main theoretical lens and focused on task performance information seeking. In this study, we propose an alternative theoretical perspective, a communication perspective, for information seeking research. Based on this perspective, we propose information relatedness and information novelty to be the two informational factors in an information seeker's source preference decision, and relational benefit and social risk to be the two relational factors. We also extend the information seeking literature to social information seeking. We propose that information relatedness has different importance in task performance and social information seeking. Our empirical study suggests that except for social risk, other factors have a significant impact on a seeker's preference of a source.