Inter-Team Coordination, Knowledge Sharing, and Performance in Teams

Abstract

Organizational teams are increasingly engaging in inter-team coordination activity. In spite of consistent findings revealed by previous research that inter-team coordination could benefit team performance by bringing teams with critical information and resources, few studies investigate how, when and why teams make use of the obtained knowledge-based resources. To address this issue, we integrate resource-based theory (RBT) and inter-team coordination literature to develop a knowledge-based theoretical model. With two-wave survey data from a sample of 80 teams in two power companies, we found that team knowledge sharing played a mediating role in the link between inter-team coordination and team performance, and knowledge integration capability moderated this relationship such that the indirect of inter-team coordination via team knowledge sharing on team performance was stronger when knowledge integration capability was high. Theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed.