Julia Mueller

Communitition: The Tension between Competition and Collaboration in Community-Based Design Contests

Following the concepts of crowdsourcing, co-creation or open innovation, companies are increasingly using contests to foster the generation of creative solutions. Currently, online idea and design contests are enjoying a resurgence through the usage of new information and communication technologies. These virtual platforms allow users both to competitively disclose their creative ideas to corporations and also to interact and collaborate with like-minded peers, communicating, discussing and sharing their insights and experiences, building social networks and establishing a sense of community. Little research has considered that contest communities both promote and benefit from simultaneous co-operation and competition and that both types of relationships need to be emphasized at the same time. In this article, it is argued that the firm-level concept of co-opetition might also be relevant for an innovations success on the individual level within contest communities. Our concept of communitition should include the elements of competitive participation without disabling the climate for co-operation, as numerous user discussions and comments improve the quality of submitted ideas and allow the future potential of an idea to shine through the so-called wisdom of the crowd.

Personality traits, affective commitment, documentation of knowledge, and knowledge sharing

Managerial influences on knowledge sharing and the importance of knowledge sharing in strategic success of firms have been well studied. Some research and theory have considered the effects of relatively malleable and situation-specific individual characteristics, such as motivation and the perception of vulnerability, on knowledge sharing. Insufficient research has considered the effects of enduring individual differences (i.e. personality traits) on knowledge sharing, although personality traits have been shown to be robust predictors of workplace behaviors, attitudes, and performance. We report a study linking two elemental personality traits, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, to knowledge sharing via affective commitment and documentation of knowledge: Agreeableness influences an individuals affective commitment to the organization; both affective commitment and Conscientiousness predict the documentation of knowledge: and, affective commitment and the documentation of knowledge influence knowledge sharing. These findings integrate the extant, heretofore unrelated bodies of literature on knowledge sharing and on personality traits in personnel selection.

Knowledge sharing between project teams and its cultural antecedents

– The aim of this article is to provide insights into how knowledge sharing between project teams takes place (if formal channels are not provided) and which cultural antecedents influence this process., – The author adopts a qualitative research design using a triangulation of methods (interviews, observations, company data and group discussions) to receive detailed results for one case study., – The findings show that knowledge sharing between project teams takes place even though top‐management did not include these processes in the formal work organization. Project team leaders as well as members share knowledge with other project teams by transferring boundary objects, interchanging team members and directly interacting. Furthermore, this study confirms some elements of a knowledge culture, but also discovers new cultural elements that are favorable and unfavorable to knowledge sharing between teams, such as personal responsibility, intrinsic motivation, top‐managements trust in employees, and output orientation., – Despite the fact that only one case study could be researched with this level of detail, the results provide insights into a research area neglected thus far and show that not all knowledge processes depend on the same cultural antecedents., – Managers and team leaders learn that knowledge sharing between project teams enhances the efficiency of project work and organizational learning., – This study addresses a specific knowledge process, namely knowledge sharing between project teams, and discovers that specific cultural antecedents support and hinder this type of cross‐boundary knowledge sharing process.

Virtual worlds as knowledge management platform – a practice‐perspective

Virtual worlds, as electronic environments where individuals can interact in a realistic manner in form of avatars, are increasingly used by gamers, consumers and employees. Therefore, they provide opportunities for reinventing business processes. Especially, effective knowledge management (KM) requires the use of appropriate information and communication technology (ICT) as well as social interaction. Emerging virtual worlds enable new ways to support knowledge and knowing processes because these virtual environments consider social aspects that are necessary for knowledge creating and knowledge sharing processes. Thus, collaboration in virtual worlds resembles real‐life activities. In this paper, we shed light on the use of Second Life (SL) as a KM platform in a real‐life setting. To explore the potential and current usage of virtual worlds for knowledge and knowing activities, we conducted a qualitative study at IBM. We interviewed IBM employees belonging to a special workgroup called ‘Web 2.0/virtual worlds’ in order to gain experience in generating and exchanging knowledge by virtually collaborating and interacting. Our results show that virtual worlds – if they are able to overcome problems like platform stability, user interface or security issues – bear the potential to serve as a KM platform. They facilitate global and simultaneous interaction, create a common context for collaboration, combine different tools for communication and enhance knowledge and knowing processes.

Formal and Informal Practices of Knowledge Sharing Between Project Teams and Enacted Cultural Characteristics

This article investigates the process of knowledge sharing between project teams and uses a case study approach. This is especially relevant, as organizations face both the needs for separating work into projects and integrating knowledge created in projects into the organization. The results provided by the analysis technique of GABEK® indicate that, although projects create boundaries, employees and project team leaders use formal mechanisms and develop informal practices for knowledge sharing between project teams. Furthermore, the article identifies organizational cultural characteristics enacted in these practices that can stimulate the discussion in “knowledge culture research” regarding the relationship of organizational cultural characteristics and (specific) knowledge processes.

It's Not My Community--Insights from Social Identity Theory Explaining Community-Failure

The availability of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has led organisations to implement different kinds of electronic knowledge networks and communities. While the technological infrastructure connects employees in different locations and allows for learning and the flow of knowledge across traditional organisational boundaries, activity frequently falls short of expectations. This exploratory study of electronic communities in the context of a research-intensive organisation sheds light on the socio-cultural issues that accompany the top-down introduction of communities. Drawing on social identity theory, we demonstrate that a lack of common identity keeps employees from actively contributing to and exchanging knowledge in the communities. Implications for the implementation and design of communities are discussed.

The Influence of Cultural Values on Knowledge Sharing across Organizational Boundaries

In order to fully derive business value from the knowledge of employees, companies introduced various knowledge management initiatives to overcome boundaries. However, knowledge sharing is still a delicate process because the willingness to share knowledge might be hindered by the lack of favorable cultural antecedents or functional and geographic distances between the persons involved. Existing studies concerning knowledge cultures have discovered isolated cultural values favorable for individual knowledge sharing. However, studies taking cultural elements and boundary spanning knowledge sharing into consideration are still missing. To close this gap, a qualitative and inductive study has been conducted in an Austrian engineering company. We researched cultural antecedents for knowledge sharing between project teams. The results provided by the analysis technique of GABEK indicate that there are several cultural elements that foster knowledge sharing across boundaries as well as starting points for managers and employees to develop a knowledge culture.