Abstract
To scale service operations requires sharing knowledge across the organization. However, prior work highlights that individuals on the periphery of organizational knowledge sharing networks may struggle to access useful knowledge at work. A knowledge repository (KR) has the potential to help peripheral individuals gain access to valuable knowledge because it is universally available and can be used without social interaction. However, for it to serve this equalizing function, those on the periphery of the organizational knowledge sharing networks must actually use it, possibly overcoming barriers to doing so. In this paper, we develop a multi-level model of knowledge use in teams to explore how individuals on the periphery of knowledge networks – due to inexperience, location, lack of social capital, gender, and role – access knowledge from a KR. Unexpectedly, we find that individuals whose experience and position already provide access to vital knowledge use a KR more frequently than individuals on the organizational periphery. We argue that this occurs because the KR – despite its appearance of equivalent accessibility – is actually more accessible to central than peripheral players. Thus, KR use is not driven primarily by the need to overcome limited access to other knowledge sources. Rather KR use is enabled when actors know how to reap value from the KR, which ironically improves with increasing access to other sources of knowledge. We conclude that KRs are unlikely to scale service operations without additional intervention.
Highlights
Knowledge workers need particular skills, practices and understanding to accomplish their work.Traditionally, they gain this knowledge through formal university training followed by domain-specific knowledge acquisition “on the job” through learning-by-doing and mentorship from co-workers.globalization has dramatically changed this traditional skill acquisition paradigm (Clark, Huckman, Staats; 2013)
We hypothesize: HYPOTHESIS 3b: Team familiarity will moderate the relationship between individual firm experience and knowledge repository (KR) sourcing such that inexperienced team members will source more as team familiarity increases and experienced team members will source less at high level levels of team familiarity
We note that if we drop the nesting of projects within customers we see the same pattern of results for our hypotheses
Summary
Knowledge workers need particular skills, practices and understanding to accomplish their work. We propose that high levels of team experience (either average years at the firm or team familiarity) help inexperienced workers source but may inhibit sourcing among experienced team members. Teams with extensive experience working together and at their firm stop searching for new ideas and information outside of their team (Chi, Huang, & Lin, 2009; Katz, 1982; Katz & Allen, 1982; Katz & Tushman, 1979) These group-level dynamics may inhibit KR use among teams even with strong information processing capabilities. We hypothesize: HYPOTHESIS 3b: Team familiarity will moderate the relationship between individual firm experience and KR sourcing such that inexperienced team members will source more as team familiarity increases and experienced team members will source less at high level levels of team familiarity To this point we have focused on the moderating effects of average team experience and team familiarity, which are both team properties based on averages. HYPOTHESIS 4: Team KR sourcing is associated with better team performance
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