Research On Knowledge Transfer Within Cross-cultural Teams Of International Construction Projects

While the overseas contractors in China are booming,there are many problems such as extensive management.Among them,the lack of effective management of knowledge is very prominent,and the problem must be improved urgently.In the process of international engineering project construction,project team members have accumulated many rich experiences,but only exists in themselves.As the flow of personnel,subsequently a lot of valuable knowledge losted.An effective knowledge transfer mechanism will help to share the experience with the project members,and the recessive knowledge can be innovated to organization.How to promote the knowledge transfer within the cross-cultural team of international engineering projects is an urgent problem to be solved.Through literature analysis,expert interview and other methods,this study identified 8 influencing factors of knowledge transfer effect in international engineering cross-cultural team,including emotional trust,cognitive trust,cultural distance,team identity of members,silence and complexity of knowledge,willingness to contribute and willingness to receive knowledge,etc.Based on the identification of influencing factors,14 hypotheses among influencing factors are proposed through literature research,and a conceptual model of the influence mechanism of knowledge transfer within cross-cultural teams of international engineering projects is constructed.The study was conducted through questionnaire survey.SPSS 26.0software was used to conduct descriptive statistics and reliability test on the sample data,and AMOS 25.0software was used to conduct confirmatory factor analysis to test the validity of the sample data and provide support for further data analysis.The hypotheses of the model are verified by using structural equation modeling method.The results show that both affective trust and team identity have positive effects on knowledge contribution intention.Knowledge tacitness,knowledge complexity and cultural distance have negative effects on knowledge contribution intention.Affective trust,cognitive trust,team identity and knowledge complexity have positive effects on knowledge acceptance willingness.Cultural distance has a negative effect on the willingness to accept knowledge;Knowledge contribution intention and knowledge reception intention have positive influence on knowledge transfer effect.Social network theory and related network analysis methods are introduced to study A cross-cultural team of Company A as an example.The influence of affective trust network,cognitive trust network and cultural distance network on knowledge transfer effect network was studied by using QAP analysis.The results showed that the higher the affective trust and cognitive trust,the better the transfer effect.The increase of cultural distance among employees is not conducive to the improvement of knowledge transfer effect.And through node importance analysis,knowledge group analysis and network overall structure characteristics analysis,the current situation of knowledge transfer within the cross-cultural team is studied.According to the results of empirical research and case analysis,this paper proposes strategies to improve the effect of knowledge transfer in cross-cultural teams from two aspects of "cross-cultural team building" and "support of international engineering contracting enterprises".Research contribution of this study is to: first,under the background of international engineering,this paper studies the influence factors of cross-cultural knowledge transfer within the team,according to the influence factors of identified,build cross-cultural paths,the influence of knowledge transfer within the team that will help to enrich the theory of knowledge transfer,as well as the cross-cultural team to provide theoretical basis for the construction of international engineering.In addition,knowledge transfer within the cross-cultural team of international engineering projects,that is,between members,can improve the knowledge level of the whole project team,thus promoting the overall knowledge level of international contractors and enhancing their core competitiveness.The localization management of international contractors also has certain reference significance.