Research by Wharton management professor Martine Haas and Morten Hansen, professor of entrepreneurship at INSEAD, indicates that knowledge sharing efforts often fail to result in improved task outcomes inside organizations - and may even hurt project performance. In practice, according to Haas, the types of knowledge shared and the design of the organization's project teams are likely to influence the success or failure of a knowledge-sharing effort.
While part of the challenge is to use knowledge appropriate for the task, Haas notes that organizations also face the problem of setting up teams in ways that help them take full advantage of the knowledge they use. As the researchers note in their paper, many project teams in knowledge-intensive organizations operate in environments than can interfere with their ability to perform well because they are characterized by overload, commitment, lack of knowledge at right level leading to ambiguity and politics.
These characteristics create problems when teams attempt to obtain and use knowledge from other parts of their organization. "In overloaded environments, project teams face a multitude of possible issues to address and solutions with which to address them, and as a result of ambiguity, there is little way to know which problems and solutions to select," Haas says. "Beyond these problems, multiple stakeholders may have personal agendas and interests in the team's selections that may actually work at cross-purposes with the team's own efforts."
In ambiguous situations, meanwhile, team members face multiple interpretations of the information, know-how and feedback they obtain, and they must engage in a continuous process of sense making to construct meaning from these inputs. The level of prior work experience possessed by team members may also create absorptive capacity that facilitates the assimilation, interpretation and application of new knowledge. Additionally, prior experience tends to help team members move up their own learning curves, helping them to build on past successes and avoid past mistakes when they interpret and apply external knowledge.
Haas argues that an organization's project teams should be given sufficient autonomy to make their own decisions. "While many outsiders who provide information, know-how and feedback to team members do not attempt to influence the team unduly, others may promote their own agendas and interests through distortion or manipulation," she says. "If a team cannot buffer itself against efforts to excessively influence its decisions, its project may be derailed by these external agendas and interests."
Overall, research by Haas and Hansen suggests that organizations that care about knowledge sharing must look beyond intermediate goals - such as promoting knowledge capture, search and transfer. Haas and Hansen's research has identified three dimensions of task performance - work quality, time savings and signals of competence - that are often critical to the productivity of knowledge work.
The first key implication is that it is unsafe to assume that more knowledge sharing is always better. In fact, using too much of the wrong type of knowledge can harm project performance if the manager or team leader himself is not aware about the intricacies of the project. The design of a project team affects its ability to achieve the desired advantages of knowledge sharing.
Message: Avoid brain storming sessions if there are not enough experts in the team because "If a message can be interpreted in several ways, it will be interpreted in a manner that maximizes damages." - Second Law of Organizational Communication
Sharing is of no use if the so-called knowledge seekers are not aware about the basics that can be learnt only thru proper education.
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