| The emerging problem for organizations today is not just collecting and sharing more knowledge—it is finding ways to use this knowledge effectively. This dissertation develops a team perspective that focuses on the challenges that teams face when using knowledge from within and beyond the organization, and the conditions that enable them to address these challenges successfully. It is usually assumed that access to more knowledge should improve performance in organizations. But the team perspective shows that some teams perform less effectively when they access more distributed knowledge, because using that knowledge creates political, time, and interpretation problems that overwhelm its potential benefits. However, teams with relatively high autonomy, low workloads, and local and cosmopolitan members can overcome these problems and use distributed knowledge to improve the quality of the projects they deliver to their clients. These findings come from a multi-method field study conducted at a leading international development agency, where qualitative data were collected from 70 interviews and seven team case studies, and quantitative data included survey responses from 550 members of 96 teams and independent ratings of project quality. The results have implications for theory and research on organizational knowledge, organizational design, team effectiveness, and international management. |
