Wellsprings of Knowledge: Building and Sustaining the Sources of Innovation
Wellsprings of Knowledge: Building and Sustaining the Sources of Innovation
The Mutual Knowledge Problem and Its Consequences for Dispersed Collaboration
Organization Science
Integrating Knowledge in Groups: How Formal Interventions Enable Flexibility
Organization Science
Into the Black Box: The Knowledge Transformation Cycle
Management Science
Coordination in Fast-Response Organizations
Management Science
A Dialogical Approach to the Creation of New Knowledge in Organizations
Organization Science
Information and Organization
The Journal of Strategic Information Systems
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Knowledge differences impede the work of cross-functional teams by making knowledge integration difficult, especially when the teams are faced with novelty. One approach in the literature for overcoming these difficulties, which we refer to as the traverse approach, is for team members to identify, elaborate, and then explicitly confront the differences and dependencies across the knowledge boundaries. This approach emphasizes deep dialogue and requires significant resources and time. In an exploratory in-depth longitudinal study of three quite different cross-functional teams, we found that the teams were able to cogenerate a solution without needing to identify, elaborate, and confront differences and dependencies between the specialty areas. Our analysis of the extensive team data collected over time surfaced practices that minimized members' differences during the problem-solving process. We suggest that these practices helped the team to transcend knowledge differences rather than traverse them. Characteristic of these practices is that they avoided interpersonal conflict, fostered the rapid cocreation of intermediate scaffolds, encouraged continued creative engagement and flexibility to repeatedly modify solution ideas, and fostered personal responsibility for translating personal knowledge to collective knowledge. The contrast between these two approaches to knowledge integration—traverse versus transcend—suggests the need for more nuanced theorizing about the use of boundary objects, the nature of dialogue, and the role of organizational embeddedness in understanding how knowledge differences are integrated.