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Multilevel Investigation of Antecedents of Knowledge Sharing and Seeking in Teams Again, both hypotheses 2a and 2b describe mere individual level effects within groups. At the team level, intrinsic motivation should encourage both behaviors. Being surrounded by a team that, in comparison to other teams, highly enjoys knowledge transfer should constitute a more positive climate for transfer and thereby encourage individual team members to share more knowledge, regardless of their own motivation. Furthermore, working in such a team should encourage single employees to seek more knowledge as their team members enjoy helping them, thereby reinforcing seeking behavior. Therefore, we predict: HYPOTHESIS 2c: Team mean intrinsic motivation (i.e., intrinsic motivation at the team level) is positively related to knowledge sharing and knowledge seeking. With respect to extrinsic motivation, we propose no such contextual effect; if members of a team primarily transfer knowledge for extrinsic rewards, they are motivated to transfer only if there are rewards inherent in the transfer situation. Consequently, there is no general positive climate for transfer as in the case of intrinsic motivation. Job Autonomy. Job autonomy is “the degree to which the job provides substantial freedom, independence, and discretion to the employee in scheduling the work and in determining the procedures to be used in carrying it out” (Hackman & Oldham, 1975, p. 162). Several findings indicate that job autonomy is related to knowledge transfer, especially to knowledge sharing. Knowledge sharing is very costly for the knowledge source in terms of time, effort, and energy (Constant et al., 1996; Goodman & Darr, 1998; Reagans & McEvily, 2003; Szulanski, 1996). To be able to share knowledge during working hours, employees must have a certain degree of freedom in deciding when and how they do their work, which gives them the opportunity to make time and spend energy on knowledge sharing. Furthermore, job autonomy has been shown to be related to creativity and innovation (Amabile, Conti, Coon, Lazenby, & Herron, 1996; Paolillo & Brown, 1978). Accordingly, employees who have greater job autonomy are thought to develop more ideas and create more knowledge than 54
Multilevel Investigation of Antecedents of Knowledge Sharing and Seeking in Teams others (Nonaka, 1994). Consequently, they have more or different knowledge than their team members, and should therefore be sought out more often as sources of knowledge. Therefore, we predict: HYPOTHESIS 3a: Job autonomy is positively related to knowledge sharing at the individual level. As we argued before, the knowledge seeker will seek more knowledge from colleagues when the chances are high that this behavior will yield positive results. An increase in job autonomy might increase the number of knowledge seeking opportunities, since it gives the seeker more freedom to do so, but it does not necessarily increase the frequency of actual knowledge seeking. The decision to ask colleagues for knowledge also depends on the probability of receiving a helpful answer. According to Borgatti and Cross (2003), one of the main influences on seeking information from another person is timely access to that person’s thinking. And if the seeker’s colleagues can provides access to their knowledge is, as argued above, at least partly dependent on their job autonomy. Consequently, the seeker is encouraged to ask team members for advice if these have, on average, greater job autonomy, and not necessarily if the seeker’s own job autonomy is high. Therefore, we predict: HYPOTHESIS 3b: Team mean job autonomy (i.e., job autonomy at the team level) is positively related to knowledge seeking. 2.4. Method 2.4.1. Sample and data collection The study was conducted at two mid-sized German companies, an automobile manufacturer and a financial service provider. Survey data were collected from 68 teams with a total number of N=572 employees. To avoid biased team-level estimations due to non-response, one team with only one participant was excluded from the study (Timmerman, 2005), leaving 55
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Knowledge Transfer in Teams and Its
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Preventing Knowledge Loss When Empl
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the demographic change. Accordingly
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employing the distinctions recommen
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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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