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Multilevel Investigation of Antecedents of Knowledge Sharing and Seeking in Teams sharing alone, this does not necessarily lead to successful knowledge transfer. Second, our findings underline that practitioners should always keep in mind that when employees are working in teams or work groups, individual knowledge transfer behavior is not just influenced by individual factors, such as the employees’ respective age or motivation, but also by the composition of their team, i.e., by the distribution of different factors throughout the team. According to our results, there are different measures practitioners can take to encourage knowledge sharing and knowledge seeking within their teams. For example, we demonstrated that although knowledge sharing behavior is partly influenced by factors that are difficult or impossible to change, for example, employee age or intrinsic motivation, there are several conducive factors that are within their control: employing more employees full-time, giving employees more freedom to decide how they structure their work and when to do it, and creating an atmosphere that values suggesting ideas, finding new methods, and taking risks. Research on leadership (Ostroff, Kinicki, & Tamkins, 2003) has shown that team leaders play an important role in influencing the climate and atmosphere within teams. On the other hand, our results suggest that, to increase knowledge seeking, managers should stress the extrinsic benefits that lie in gaining knowledge from others (e.g., as an easy and fast way to solve problems, Constant et al., 1996) or, if possible, to set extrinsic rewards (e.g., financial benefits or other bonuses) for knowledge seeking. As already noted above, giving many employees within a team more job autonomy also encourages single employees to seek more knowledge within the team. Furthermore, when composing teams, managers should not only take into account the absolute age of team members, but also the age diversity, as it is the relative age to other team members that influences the frequency of knowledge transfer behaviors. 72
Multilevel Investigation of Antecedents of Knowledge Sharing and Seeking in Teams 2.6.7. Limitations The present study has some limitations that should be noted. First of all, we only examine knowledge transfer within teams. Consequently, our results cannot be generalized to transfer across team borders. More generally, the generalizability is limited since data were collected from two German companies in a cross-sectional design. Accordingly, our sample might not be representative for all organizations, and inferences cannot be made about the direction of effects. Moreover, we did not differentiate between different kinds or characteristics of knowledge. The influences might have differed for sharing tacit versus explicit knowledge (Nonaka, 1994; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995; Nonaka & von Krogh, 2009), more versus less ambiguous knowledge (Szulanski, 1996, 2000; Szulanski, Cappetta, & Jensen, 2004), or more versus less codifiable knowledge (Reagans & McEvily, 2003). However, these distinctions have already been well researched and are widely accepted, and introducing a third distinction in the present study would not only have complicated matters in a non-negligible manner, but would also have rendered the parsimonious approach to measurement impossible. Furthermore, limitations with respect to the operationalization of constructs have to be mentioned; independent as well as dependent variables were operationalized via self-reports, and the scales we used were very parsimonious, measuring constructs with only two to four items. First, using only one measurement source can entail common method bias that can inflate or deflate the estimations of relationships between constructs (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Lee, & Podsakoff, 2003). To control common method bias, we took several steps recommended by Podsakoff and colleagues (2003) when designing the study’s procedure: we protected respondents’ anonymity and reduced evaluation apprehension as much as possible. Furthermore, we improved scale items by reducing ambiguity through the clarification of key 73
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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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Knowledge, Knowledge Management, an
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Knowledge, Knowledge Management, an
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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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