THE EFFECT OF DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP ON KNOWLEDGE SHARING BEHAVIOUR: A FIELD STUDY OF ACADEMIC DEPARTMENTS HEADS

Abstract

Digital citizenship has become a practical requirement of academic leadership, yet its behavioural consequences inside universities remain weakly evidenced. This study examines whether digital citizenship, operationalised as digital literacy, digital security, and digital health and well-being, promotes knowledge sharing behaviour across individual, organisational, and technological dimensions. A descriptive-analytical design was applied to heads of academic departments at Al-Mustansiriya University, a population occupying the hinge between the academic and administrative functions of the institution. Purposive sampling yielded 78 valid responses from 83 distributed questionnaires, a 94.0% response rate, measured through a 30-item five-point Likert instrument and analysed in SPSS 26. The instrument showed acceptable internal consistency (alpha = .890) and satisfied normality assumptions. Descriptive results indicate uniformly high practice levels, with digital literacy strongest (M = 4.059) and organisational support for knowledge sharing weakest (M = 3.708). Digital citizenship correlated positively with knowledge sharing (r = .615, p < .001) and explained 37.8% of its variance. Entered simultaneously, the three dimensions explained 38.2% of variance; a relative-weight decomposition attributed 41.9% of that explained variance to digital health and well-being, 34.7% to digital security, and 23.4% to digital literacy. Safety and sustainability of digital practice, rather than technical competence alone, appear to drive academic knowledge exchange.