thesis_Daniela Noethen_print final - Jacobs University

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Multilevel Investigation of Antecedents of Knowledge Sharing and Seeking in Teams they found that an intrinsic motivation to learn predicted higher levels of knowledge seeking. We extended these findings by demonstrating that intrinsic benefits expected from knowledge transfer, too, have an effect on the frequency of seeking behavior, and that intrinsic motivation has an equal influence on both transfer behaviors. The influence of extrinsic benefits on knowledge transfer has been, as reported earlier, an issue of ongoing debate in the extant literature, which might be due to the mixture of knowledge transfer behaviors considered. In the present study, we demonstrate that extrinsic benefits have a strong positive effect on seeking knowledge, whereas they have no significant effect on knowledge sharing. However, since some of the studies that found positive effects exclusively dealt with knowledge sharing (and not seeking) in IT settings (Constant et al., 1996; Kankanhalli et al., 2005), this may only be one part of the story. If we consider knowledge seeking, the effect of extrinsic benefits seems rather obvious: extrinsic benefits are direct and, at least partly, lie in the knowledge that the seeker receives. Wasko and Faraj (2000), for example, discovered in their qualitative study that people participate in newsgroups mainly for the extrinsic benefits they expect to gain from this participation (access to work-relevant knowledge that is only available there, solving problems, etc.). On the other hand, for knowledge sharing, extrinsic benefits can only be expected if the transfer is visible, especially for supervisors, and can be rewarded accordingly. This applies far more to IT settings (e.g., contributing to an electronic knowledge repository), than for within-team knowledge transfer which occurs between colleagues. This difference might explain why sharing is sometimes affected by extrinsic benefits, and sometimes it is not. This question certainly merits further investigation, for which making a distinction between sharing and seeking knowledge seems to be worthwhile. Over and above these individual-level effects of motivation, we did not find a contextual effect of intrinsic motivation. Consequently, we have to assume that, again, it is rather the 68
Multilevel Investigation of Antecedents of Knowledge Sharing and Seeking in Teams employee’s own motivation that is decisive for the frequency of knowledge transfer behavior, and that the motivation of team members does not have an effect over and above the individual-level one. 2.6.3. Job autonomy Our results demonstrated that job autonomy influences knowledge transfer behaviors in a different manner, depending on the behavior and level investigated. Therefore, it is not surprising that so far, job autonomy has had no reported effects on knowledge transfer (e.g., Cabrera et al., 2005, did not find an effect of individual-level job autonomy on knowledge transfer); effects are blurred as soon as these distinctions are not made. Several authors demonstrated that greater job autonomy leads to higher creativity and innovation (Amabile et al., 1996; Paolillo & Brown, 1978), which should be related to more knowledge creation. We have shown that, in addition, job autonomy enables the dissemination of such knowledge within the team. At the team level though, this effect disappears. When the members of a team had, on average, greater autonomy than employees in other teams, this did not improve knowledge sharing within their team. The effects of job autonomy on knowledge seeking mirrored these results. Although it did not make a difference if the individual employee had higher or lower job autonomy, knowledge seeking was far more frequent if the other team members had higher job autonomy. In other words, with respect to knowledge seeking, we only found a team-level effect. Our results suggest that the decisive factor for knowledge transfer to take place is the job autonomy of the source (in terms of knowledge sharing), or the possible sources (in terms of knowledge seeking), and not the job autonomy of the receiver or seeker. 69
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Knowledge Transfer in Teams and Its
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Table of Contents Contents Acknowle
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Acknowledgements Acknowledgements T
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Acknowledgements Last but not least
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General Introduction and of older w
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General Introduction in the smooth
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Outline Outline The core of the pre
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Outline on knowledge sharing, as we
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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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would be very different than for a
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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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