thesis_Daniela Noethen_print final - Jacobs University
thesis_Daniela Noethen_print final - Jacobs University
thesis_Daniela Noethen_print final - Jacobs University
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Multilevel Investigation of Antecedents of Knowledge Sharing and Seeking in Teams<br />
sharing alone, this does not necessarily lead to successful knowledge transfer. Second, our<br />
findings underline that practitioners should always keep in mind that when employees are<br />
working in teams or work groups, individual knowledge transfer behavior is not just<br />
influenced by individual factors, such as the employees’ respective age or motivation, but also<br />
by the composition of their team, i.e., by the distribution of different factors throughout the<br />
team.<br />
According to our results, there are different measures practitioners can take to encourage<br />
knowledge sharing and knowledge seeking within their teams. For example, we demonstrated<br />
that although knowledge sharing behavior is partly influenced by factors that are difficult or<br />
impossible to change, for example, employee age or intrinsic motivation, there are several<br />
conducive factors that are within their control: employing more employees full-time, giving<br />
employees more freedom to decide how they structure their work and when to do it, and<br />
creating an atmosphere that values suggesting ideas, finding new methods, and taking risks.<br />
Research on leadership (Ostroff, Kinicki, & Tamkins, 2003) has shown that team leaders play<br />
an important role in influencing the climate and atmosphere within teams. On the other hand,<br />
our results suggest that, to increase knowledge seeking, managers should stress the extrinsic<br />
benefits that lie in gaining knowledge from others (e.g., as an easy and fast way to solve<br />
problems, Constant et al., 1996) or, if possible, to set extrinsic rewards (e.g., financial benefits<br />
or other bonuses) for knowledge seeking. As already noted above, giving many employees<br />
within a team more job autonomy also encourages single employees to seek more knowledge<br />
within the team. Furthermore, when composing teams, managers should not only take into<br />
account the absolute age of team members, but also the age diversity, as it is the relative age<br />
to other team members that influences the frequency of knowledge transfer behaviors.<br />
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