Informal Knowledge Governance Within Engineering Project Design Team Based On Knowledge Heterogeneity Perspective

Engineering project design team(EPDT)as the knowledge intensive team and project-based organization,knowledge heterogeneity is one of the typical traits.Knowledge heterogeneity arouses the creativity of team tremendously,and conductive to enhance the team innovation performance and team performance to a certain extent.However,with the growing complexity of engineering design projects and refinement of the task division,the level of knowledge heterogeneity continues to strengthen and impacts employee relationship and knowledge reuse behaviours,thus impacts team performance.In the meanwhile,knowledge heterogeneity also influence team cognition and team communication to some extent,thus influence the knowledge management performance.These practical questions put forward higher requirements of knowledge management,and the traditional knowledge management mode can’t satisfy the development requirements of EPDT.Hence,this paper set about from the perspective of knowledge heterogeneity,study the above issues through informal knowledge governance theory,the research mainly involves the following three aspects:First,explore how to improve knowledge management performance in EPDT through improving team cognition.Through the existing literature,build the research model of knowledge heterogeneity,team cognition,informal knowledge governance and knowledge management performance.Results indicated that informal knowledge governance plays the intermediary role between knowledge heterogeneity and knowledge management performance,and also plays the intermediary role between knowledge heterogeneity and team cognition.At the same time,team cognition plays the intermediary role between knowledge heterogeneity and knowledge management performance,and also plays the intermediary role between informal knowledge governance and knowledge management performance.Studies also showed that the team cognition process is the knowledge extract and purity process.In this process,the team situation awareness helps to identify the knowledge bottle neck,the team mental model helps to filter the inert knowledge,and the information sharing process responsible for gathering and creating high quality knowledge.After that,EPDT can gain the matured and reused knowledge.Hence,EPDT need to create good team communication atmosphere,which facilitate enhance the overall team cognition,thus achieve high knowledge management performance.Second,explore how to reduce the negative impacts of knowledge heterogeneity through improving team communication and team cognition effectively in EPDT.Through the existing literatures,build the research model of knowledge heterogeneity,team communication,team cognition and EPDT performance.Results indicated that team communication and team cognition play the intermediary role between knowledge heterogeneity and team performance in EPDT.In EPDT,through improving team communication and team cognition effectively can alleviate the negative effects of knowledge heterogeneity and promote team performance.Hence,EPDT should strive to create good communication platform and communication media,thus improve the efficiency of team communication.At the same time,in EPDT,the process of team communication is help to filter the inert knowledge.In this process,team communication transforms the heterogeneous knowledge into homogeneous knowledge.In this process of transformation,the rate of heterogeneous knowledge and homogeneous knowledge is changed constantly.Team communication transforms the heterogeneous knowledge into reusable knowledge,thus contribute to the whole performance of EPDT.Third,explore how to improve team performance by reusing knowledge effectively in EPDT.First we did a pilot study and through factor analysis determined the measurement scales of knowledge heterogeneity,knowledge reuse,employee relationship and engineering project design team performance.Then we distributed formal questionnaires and carried out a formal survey.The study demonstrates that knowledge heterogeneity impact engineering project design team performance negatively in some cases,and effective knowledge reuse and good team atmosphere help to alleviate the negative effects to a certain extent.Hence EPDT should encourage employees’ knowledge reuse behaviors and activities so as to reduce the negative effects of knowledge heterogeneity that will in turn lead to benefits for the team performance.