Research On Knowledge Transfer In Virtual Teams

In recent times, due to a variety of reasons such as globalization, competitive pressures, differential personnel costs, availability of talent in different parts of the world, and enhanced capability of telecommunications infrastructure, virtual teams are an increasingly prevalent form of work structures in the 21st century. Organizational scholars argue that knowledge is one of the most important resources that "contribute to the competitive advantage of an organization". Virtual teams are becoming a preferred mechanism for harnessing, integrating, and applying knowledge that is distributed across organizations and in pockets of collaborative networks. The academic team has a number of studies on virtual teams. However, research so far on knowledge management in virtual team, has not a lot of literature at home and abroad. Thus, one of the key issues in current VT research is how to facilitate the transfer of knowledge in virtual teams.Virtual Teams which are composed of distributed groups of people where the communication is mainly restricted to Internet-based methods are usually organized for temporal objectives, whose tasks are non-routine and knowledge-intensive. So, the completion of the tasks mainly depends on the transfer of tacit knowledge. Tacit Knowledge transfer needs more person-to-person interaction. Therefore, the transfer of knowledge virtual research team is an extremely challenging task. Thus far, the discussion on knowledge transfer in virtual teams has tended to be identifying if the drivers and inhibitors for effective transfer in general organizations such as the ability to transfer and receive of the individuals involved, and the context in which the sharing takes place also have the same influence in virtual teams. This paper addresses the difficulties of knowledge transfer based on the characteristics of virtual teams and suggests the possible transfer mechanisms virtual teams might use. This study provides useful insights for managers interested in developing global virtual teams, as well as for academics interested in pursuing virtual team research. The research contents and main innovations of this thesis are as follows:1. Based on the definition of virtual teams, this paper analyzes the specific characteristics of their knowledge and distribution in virtual teams, and then analyzes virtual teams' knowledge transformation character. 2. In view of the characteristics of virtual team, this paper summarizes five factors affecting the transfer of knowledge --context, trust, technical factors, notably cultural diversity, effective communication. These factors are the most serious challenges faced by virtual teams; a mechanism construction in light of these factors is indispensable.3. Seizing virtual team's characteristics and features of the knowledge transfer, on the basis of analyzing the effect factors of knowledge transfer in a virtual team and the basic structure of knowledge transfer, we build knowledge -transfer model on virtual team which works relying on Internet-based methods.4. Finally, in the view of the challenges of virtual teams, the research results use for reference from literature, and propose the corresponding trust mechanism, and the context mechanism and communication mechanism with the method of citation and reference. These three mechanisms are mutual promotion and mutual support-- the context mechanism and the communication mechanism promote trust mechanisms to improve, and the construction of trust mechanism rely on the improvement of master and communication of mutual context information, the three form one, and compose virtual teams' knowledge-transfer system.Overall, this study followed a thread of raise question- theoretical study- solve the question—draw the conclusion ". First, we review related theories of knowledge transfer, and then point out the inadequacies of the existing theory and direction of development, and raise question based on the characteristics of virtual team which impact its internal knowledge transfer .Then the start point of this paper decided is a research of affecting factor of virtual team's knowledge transfer. Secondly, we establish the whole framework mode of knowledge transfer through series of definition and model. Finally, the framework is as a guide to establish the according mechanism (trust mechanism, communication mechanism, context mechanism) to standardize the transfer of knowledge and to ensure the efficiency and effectiveness of virtual team.