thesis_Daniela Noethen_print final - Jacobs University

Intergenerational Knowledge Transfer in Work Teams: A Multilevel Social Network Perspective
r of 0.82. This demonstrates that beyond variables that are immanent and controlled for when
introducing knowledge reception, there is not much room for other influences.
3.6.3. Transfer as a matter of dyads, not of individuals
Interestingly, in the present study, only 11% of the overall variance of knowledge transfer was
located at the individual level, suggesting that individual level variables do not have much
predictive power. With only another 12% of the variance located at the team level, the transfer
from source to recipient is evidently mainly dependent on characteristics of the dyad, for
example the combination of characteristics of the two employees forming a specific dyad, and
not so much depending on personal characteristics of the source or recipient as such.
Moreover, only 5% of the variance of knowledge reception is located at the individual level,
demonstrating that characteristics of the recipient have even less predictive power than those
of the source. According to our data, there do not seem to be team members who “generally
transfer a lot of knowledge”, but rather dyads of employees between whom there is a lot of
transfer, and others where there is not. This calls for more research on why these differences
arise and if they are task related and therefore controllable, or rather related to personal and
interpersonal characteristics and therefore less susceptible to managerial influence.
3.6.4. Theoretical implications
Summing up, we can derive several theoretical implications from our results: First, (at least a
small amount of) intergenerational knowledge transfer seems to be occurring to an (at least
slightly) increased amount in work teams. Vis-à-vis the current demographic development,
this should be a fruitful area for future research. We have started to investigate factors related
to this phenomenon (i.e., the difference in experience between two employees), but to get a
better understanding of intergenerational knowledge transfer, it will be necessary to develop
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