thesis_Daniela Noethen_print final - Jacobs University

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Knowledge, Knowledge Management, and Knowledge Transfer With knowledge application, the “knowledge that has been captured, coded, shared, and otherwise made available is put to actual use” (Dalkir, 2005, p. 145). Without this last step, knowledge management efforts have been in vain, and there is no possibility of obtaining the intended performance improvement. The source of competitive advantage resides in the application of knowledge rather than in the knowledge itself (Alavi & Leidner, 2001; Dalkir, 2005; Pentland, 1995). Application can take many forms, for example a change in a procedure, a new product, or a system change. This brief overview of knowledge management shows that knowledge transfer is only one element of and closely intertwined with other elements of knowledge management. Nevertheless, as knowledge transfer is a central concept in this dissertation, it merits a more detailed examination, which I present in the next section. 1.1.5. Knowledge transfer Argote and Ingram (2000, p. 151) defined knowledge transfer in organizations as “the process through which one unit (e.g., group, department, or division) is affected by the experience of another.” Further, these authors suggest that knowledge transfer in organizations involves knowledge transfer between individuals, but, transcending the individual level, also includes transfer at the group, product line, department, or division level. Along the same lines, Alavi and Leidner (2001) posit that transfer occurs at various levels, that is between individuals, from individuals to explicit sources (e.g., electronic knowledge repositories), from individuals to groups, between groups, across groups, and from the group to the organization. Many studies have empirically shown that the transfer of knowledge has an influence on several organizational outcomes such as individual performance (Quigley et al., 2007), work group performance (Cummings, 2004; Mesmer-Magnus & DeChurch, 2009), firm or franchise 24
Knowledge, Knowledge Management, and Knowledge Transfer productivity (Collins & Smith, 2006; Darr et al., 1995; van Wijk et al., 2008), and innovativeness (van Wijk et al., 2008). This is not surprising, as knowledge is a productive resource which multiplies as it gets transferred, because “shared knowledge stays with the giver while it enriches the receiver” (Davenport and Prusak, 1998, p. 17). Of course, the focus of the present dissertation is not the multiplication for the benefit of productivity, but the “reproduction” of knowledge with the aim of preventing its loss when the original piece of knowledge leaves with its owner. As it is single employees who leave and whose knowledge has to be retained by transfer to a successor or colleague, the knowledge transfer between individuals is of prior interest here. Accordingly, in the following, the focus will be on knowledge transfer at the individual level. This is one of the most basic ways of transferring existing knowledge in organizations (Bock, Zmud, Kim, & Lee, 2005; Watson & Hewett, 2006), as knowledge is created by and thus primarily resides in individual employees (Nonaka, 1994). Slightly deviating from Argote and Ingram (2000), I define individual knowledge transfer (in organizations) as the process through which one employee receives knowledge from another. I use the term “employee” instead of “unit” as I refer to the individual level, employ the term “knowledge” instead of “experience” as, according to my working definition of knowledge, knowledge is more than just experience, and use the term “receives” instead of “is affected by” as an employee can be affected by another’s knowledge without knowledge transfer taking place. This process of knowledge transfer, of course, includes various different behaviors, activities and processes. For example, Szulanski (1996) describes four different stages of knowledge transfer. Although he refers to the transfer of best practices between business units, this stage model can also be applied to individual level knowledge transfer. The four stages are: initiation, which comprises events that lead to the transfer, e.g., the search for a specific piece of knowledge, implementation, which is the actual transmission of knowledge, ramp-up, which refers to the stage of first uses of the new knowledge by the recipient, and integration, during 25
Page 1 and 2: Knowledge Transfer in Teams and Its
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Multilevel Investigation of Anteced
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Intergenerational Knowledge Transfe
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Preventing Knowledge Loss When Empl
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the demographic change. Accordingly
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analysis was dyadic knowledge trans
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questions. The limitations that wil
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“there are situations where knowl
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employing the distinctions recommen
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valuable addition to the existing l
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covers a very specific area of know
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the importance of including lower l
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Foss, N. J., Husted, K., & Michailo
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Watson, S., & Hewett, K. (2006). A
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