Beyond Knowledge Transfer: A Typology of Knowledge Sharing Behavior in Virtual Teams

The ability to mobilize knowledge from different parts of an organization is central to organizational success in changeable and competitive, global environments. Although there is much research on knowledge transfer in organizations, it focuses predominantly on organizational units as a level of analysis, and attends primarily to the outcomes rather than the processes of knowledge mobilization and use. We build on the more fine-grained concept of knowledge sharing focused at the interpersonal and group level of analysis, which offers a complement to studies of knowledge transfer and can yield valuable additional insights into the phenomenon of how organizational members use others’ knowledge successfully for organizational ends. This study contributes a more nuanced understanding of how knowledge is mobilized in practice by empirically identifying three distinct but complementary knowledge sharing practices used by globally dispersed new product development teams. We discuss implications for group and organizational learning. (146)