thesis_Daniela Noethen_print final - Jacobs University

Intergenerational Knowledge Transfer in Work Teams: A Multilevel Social Network Perspective
in knowledge transfer between age homogenous and age diverse teams should be small as
well.
3.6.2. Knowledge reception
Of all the variables tested, the transfer that the source received from the recipient had the
strongest influence on knowledge transfer. This is in line with previous research: Wasko and
Faraj (2000) have shown that participants in newsgroups help other members of these groups,
because they themselves received help in the past and feel an obligation to “give back”.
Furthermore, Bock and colleagues (2005) as well as Kankanhalli and colleagues (2005)
reported that employees who expected reciprocation from others intended to share more
knowledge and contributed more to electronic knowledge repositories, respectively. In all of
these studies, a generalized rather than person-specific form of reciprocity was considered,
that is, the reciprocal relationship was rather between a participant and a group (whose
members might not even be known personally). In our study, we consider long-standing
relationships between dyads of colleagues who have been working together for years. Thus,
expectations as well as obligations should be a lot stronger, as would be the effect on
knowledge transfer. Moreover, other variables, such as mutual trust or being on good terms
(e.g., Szulanski, 1996), influence both directions of knowledge transfer within a dyad in the
same manner, and could have strengthened the relationship between knowledge transfer and
knowledge reception in addition to reciprocity effects. But even considering all these
arguments, the effect of knowledge reception in the present study is surprisingly strong; over
and above the other control variables, knowledge reception alone explained 63% of the
overall variance. Thus, this transfer in the opposite direction is a truly powerful predictor. The
strength of the relationship was already visible in the high zero-order correlation, reaching an
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