What Drives Working Habits for Sharing Knowledge in Virtual Teams? An Organizational Embeddedness Perspective

Abstract

This study explores employees’ working habits regarding knowledge sharing using new malleable technologies within virtual teams in a Taiwanese society. The exploratory, qualitative data, gained from observations and extracted from 26 interviews, were analyzed using thematic analysis. It was found that employees used internal IS less but made more use of external IT in their everyday activities. It was also found that the structuration of internal IS inhibited their habits and IT practices on account of the problem of “over-embeddedness.” Group members, by contrast, more habitually used external IT to share information and experiences with others because of their strong relational and structural embeddedness in the external IT. In the structuration of knowledge-sharing practices, the appropriation of external IT may explain why users are engaged in such habitual behavior. To foster employees’ working behavioral habits regarding knowledge sharing in virtual teams, an institution can introduce job stability and organizational norms to reinforce structural embeddedness, while integrity-based trust and affective commitment, which underlie cultural homophily, are encouraged in group relationships to reinforce relational embeddedness (relative to Guanxi). This paper thus provides new pathways for group members to develop and sustain their habits in the use of external IT rather than internal IS.