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Article Excerpt
In formation technology can facilitate the dissemination of knowledge across the organization-even to the point of making virtual teams a viable alternative to face-to-face work. However, unless managed, the combination of information technology and virtual work may serve to change the distribution of different types of knowledge across individuals, teams, and the organization. Implications include the possibility that information technology plays the role of a jealous mistress when it comes to the development and ownership of valuable knowledge in organizations; that is, in formation technology may destabilize the relationship between organizations and their employees when it comes to the transfer of knowledge. The paper advances theory and informs practice by illustrating the dynamics of knowledge development and transfer in more and less virtual teams.
Keywords: Group dynamics, organizational learning, knowledge acquisition, knowledge utilization, distributed work arrangements
ISRL Categories: AA09, AC0303, AL04, DD06, GA0501
Introduction
Organizations are under constant pressure to create synergies in the resources under their control. Teams and knowledge management are two areas that are often fruitful in providing increased value when carefully managed. Teams can increase capability, flexibility, and responsiveness (for a review, see Leavitt 1996), while knowledge management is believed to be crucial to organizational performance (Berman et al. 2002; Kogut and Zander 1992; Liebeskind 1996).
Technology often plays a supporting role in this work. For example, "LotusNotes...and Vision Quest help us to work in a more organized fashion as a team and be more productive" (participant 11504 in DeSanctis et al. 2000, p. 2). Technology may provide a means of structuring teamwork, enhance the information available to the team, and/or provide a communication system (McGrath and Berdahl 1998). Technology may "informate" the work process, creating information where it did not exist before (Zuboff 1988, p. 10). That is, technology may go beyond mere automation of the task, for example, by providing an information stream about the task and its interrelationships.
Technology may also expand the opportunities for teams to be effective. The growth of virtual teams in organizations is the example on which we will focus here. Organizations can form teams regardless of the physical location of the members, providing further opportunity and flexibility in building the best teams (e.g., Griffith and Neale 2001). Organizations can also take advantage of the ability of such teams to work around the clock by locating team members in time zones spanning the globe. Almost one-third of a sample of Fortune 500 firms has some form of virtual work in place (Davenport and Pearlson 1998).
We believe there is additional opportunity in considering virtual teams and knowledge management in tandem. More and less virtual teams use technology in ways that capture more and less knowledge for the organization. Modern organizational teams have access to a variety of communication and work process technologies. These range from e-mail and voice mail to broad-based enterprise solutions such as SAP. More virtual teams seem to use technology to do their work as a matter of course, passively collecting knowledge and perhaps sidestepping many of the motivational problems of knowledge management (e.g., Goodman and Darr 1998) found in more traditional settings. Equivalent levels of knowledge capture in less virtual teams might require added work. The added work, even the straightforward task of documentation, may cause such efforts to fail, regardless of the benefit of knowledge management (Goodman and Darr 1998; Majchrzak et al. 2000).
There may also be negative effects related to virtual teams and knowledge. If the perspective is that of increasing value to the organization, our analysis seems to suggest that the use of more virtual teams provides an opportunity for knowledge capture to occur at a low marginal cost. However, individuals who hold this knowledge to be captured may experience a considerable loss even as the organization gains.
The discussion below will assess the dynamics between the individual, the organization, and information technology in the context of teams that vary in their virtualness. First we address the role communication and information technologies play in the form and function of teams. We then make the critical link between types of knowledge and knowledge transfer in more and less virtual teams. Finally, implications are considered, including the possibility that information technology may play the role of a jealous mistress when it comes to the development and ownership of valuable knowledge in organizations; that is, information technology may destabilize the relationship between organizations and their employees when it comes to the transfer of knowledge.
Knowledge and Virtualness in Teams
Context: Virtualness and Knowledge
Team context and technological support are key to our analysis. Technology enables these variations in context in two ways. First, communication technology (such as e-mail, voice mail, etc.) makes it feasible for work teams to be formed with members who do not necessarily work in close proximity. The reduction in physical and temporal boundaries subsequently diminishes the likelihood that homogenous teams are formed for convenience, or due to other factors that might collocate members in either space or time (Griffith and Neale 2001). In addition, group support technology (such as GroupSystems[TM] or LotusNotes [TM]) may provide additional functionality by structuring the team's tasks, enabling analysis of the team's process, and/or the storage of the team's information.
Clearly the functionality of such technologies is mutable and socially constructed (Barley 1986; DeSanctis and Poole 1994; Griffith 1999). Different configurations may provide communication and/or support (Griffith and Northcraft 1994) and teams may choose to appropriate different technology features, or not. As a result, we will speak in terms of more or less virtual rather than technological, physical, or temporal structures. Figure 1 provides a graphic description showing the full range of work team possibilities.
We propose three distinct team categories: traditional, hybrid, and pure virtual. The y-axis represents the level of technological support used by the team. Technological support (either electronic or otherwise) may include communication, documentation, and/ordecision support capability. The x-axis represents the percentage of work that the team does with its members distributed across time or space. The z-axis represents the distribution of the physical locations occupied by the team members. (2) Note that pure virtual teams take up the plane depicted on the far right, regardless of the level of technological support they use. We believe that teams that never meet face-to-face are different in a nonlinear way from teams that do meet (and show this plane as separate to highlight this difference). (3) Pure face-to-face (traditional) teams form the other extreme and are depicted as the cube at the origin of the graph. These are teams that do all of their work face-to-face, and make no use of technological suppo rt. In the current technology environment, pure face-to-face teams may be rare in organizations. Most of today's organizational teams are likely to fall into the large hybrid category of teams composed of members who interact overtime, according to the needs of the moment, and through media, with the amount of face-to-face contact determined by their own adaptation and structuration of the process (e.g., DeSanctis and Poole 1994). This space is shown as the large shaded area in Figure 1.
More virtual teams may be able to draw upon a larger network for sources of knowledge due to their expected greater informational diversity (Griffith and Neale 2001). Similarity (e.g., Ancona and Caldwell 1992), proximity (e.g., Festinger et al. 1950), and prior acquaintance (e.g., Goins and Mannix 1999) are all factors that may bring particular members into a team. However, such forces serve to reduce potential team knowledge as the knowledge and perspective of team members drawn from similar social networks are likely to be redundant (Granovetter 1973). We believe that virtual teams are more likely to be derived from less similar members than are more traditional teams. In fact, virtual teams are likely to be formed when needed skills are not available locally (Boutellier et al. 1998), suggesting that more virtual teams are less likely to be drawn from similar social networks. As a result, we assume members of virtual teams will have access to a potentially greater base of knowledge through their individual team members than collocated teams. (4) Further, as teams differ in their amount of virtualness, so too do they differ in critical ways regarding the transfer of knowledge from their members to the team and to the organization. In the section below, we present a model of knowledge transfer and highlight the areas where virtualness may play a role in how knowledge is transferred among individuals, to the team, and the organization.
Knowledge in Organizations
The scientific understanding of knowledge in organizations is still in an infant stage in spite of a large and growing literature focused on organizational knowledge, organizational learning, knowledge creation, and knowledge management. Beyond common concepts such as tacit knowledge and organizational knowledge, the many theoretical frameworks offer diverse concepts, terminology, hypotheses, and evidence (Nonaka and Nishiguchi 2001).
A thorough review of the knowledge literature is beyond the scope of this manuscript. We wish to focus on the distinction between individual and social knowledge for differing types of knowledge development in the context of virtual teams. Individual knowledge is composed of the psychological components that reside within the individual. Social knowledge is a collective type of knowledge that is publicly available or embedded within the routines, culture, or norms of the team (Spender 1996). A group's repertoire of decision-making approaches is an example of such social knowledge. We detail the components of individual and social knowledge below as we focus on how knowledge transfers among individuals and becomes available to the team. Figure 2 provides a stylized model of this transformation.
This model is presented from a perspective of virtual teams where membership is relatively stable, but with members having interaction both within the focal team, as well as with collocated others. We leave the possibility of teams with more fluid membership (e.g., Gruenfeld et al. 2000) for future consideration. The propositions will be stated in terms of more and less virtual. This allows for consideration of more virtual teams that spend little time on task together, use a great deal of technology for their communication and work, and are geographically distributed, as well as slightly less virtual teams that might have more face to face interaction, or subgroups (some collocated members), and less virtual teams with greater amounts of face-to-face interaction, more collocated members, and less dependence on technology for communication and work.
Knowledge and its Transfer In Virtual Teams
In the next sections, we will use Figure 2 as a road map for examining different types of knowledge; the moderating effects of absorptive capacity, communities of practice, transactive memory, and synergy; and the recursive link from the resulting usable knowledge. We use the term usable knowledge here to reflect the notion that while knowledge may exist within the team (potential team knowledge), it is not usable unless the team possesses the necessary tacit knowledge, both at the individual and social level, to know when and how to use that knowledge. This model is largely drawn from extant literature, as we will point out as we discuss the model,...
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