thesis_Daniela Noethen_print final - Jacobs University

Intergenerational Knowledge Transfer in Work Teams: A Multilevel Social Network Perspective
& Wienk, 2003) and, thus, describes for how long an employee has been doing the present or
similar tasks within the presence of the same contextual factors. Therefore, it contains
information about how long the employee has been able to collect knowledge about tasks, the
organization, the people directly working with, etc. Thereby, team tenure provides more
information about relevant knowledge and experience than job tenure or organizational
tenure, although it of course only captures a quantitative aspect of experience.
In equivalence to Hypothesis 1a, we argue that, if the source has longer team tenure than
the recipient, the source should transfer more knowledge to the recipient due to the experience
asymmetry. Accordingly, we predict:
HYPOTHESIS 2a: The difference in team tenure between the source and the recipient is
positively related to knowledge transfer from source to recipient (and this beyond the
influence of the age difference between source and recipient).
If this difference in team tenure can explain variance over and above the effect of age
difference and diminishes the effect of age difference at the same time, it can be argued that
the effect of age difference on knowledge transfer exists because it is accompanied by a
difference in experience. Other explanations such as generativity would then not play a
dominant role.
Furthermore, we can argue, in equivalence to Hypothesis 1b, that sources who have a
longer team tenure should have a certain expert status and should be sought out more due to
their experience by team colleagues, irrespective of the team colleagues’ age or team tenure.
Therefore, we predict:
HYPOTHESIS 2b: The team tenure of the source is positively related to knowledge transfer
from source to recipient (and this beyond the influence of the age of the source).
Again, if individual team tenure can explain variance over and above the effect of
individual age and can diminish the effect of age at the same time, we can assume that the
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