I.I.M. Banaglore

Knowledge sharing in distributed teams

It has been well established in the literature that a firm�s competitive advantage lies in its ability to create, assemble, integrate, exploit and transfer knowledge assets. A learning organization is one that is skilled in creating, acquiring, transferring knowledge and modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights. Organizations can be viewed as systems that process a given set of inputs to outputs. For an organization, this is a function of long-term strategic choice, the transformation process and the administrative structures in place, which in effect, are functions of the knowledge base available in the organization. Organizations learn over a period of time and this leads to the knowledge base development, the usefulness of which is determined by the relevance and the accessibility of the knowledge.

Knowledge transfer is a process through which knowledge gets shared and determines how knowledge flows from one part to the other in an organization. Effective KT is fraught with several issues; the most common being that organizations do not know what they know since technical, functional and market knowledge is being generated continuously in all parts of the organization. In the context of global organizations, which operate primarily through the functioning of distributed teams, the issue of knowledge transfer becomes all the more crucial. There have been numerous attempts in literature to identify factors responsible for knowledge transfer in organizations in several contexts; however the specific context of knowledge transfer in distributed teams is under researched. This study drawing upon the literature from diverse fields such as Media Richness theory, Social Capital Theory, Organization Learning theories builds up a theoretical model to be empirically tested in the specific context of Knowledge Industry, particularly in the IT R&D organizations, where the primary input is knowledge, and the work teams are distributed across time and space. The methodology adopted for the final data collection would be survey based method.