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Publications (132)
This essay was prepared in response to an invitation by Stephen Zaccaro, the President of INGRoup, and Lyn Van Swol, the Editor of Small Group Research, to recipients of the McGrath Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Groups. My essay provides an overview of my research, including the human as well as the intellectual side of the endeavo...
This study examines how individuals come to occupy communication network positions and the effect of selection processes on group performance. Drawing on the Carnegie perspective and research on communication networks, we compare the performance of groups whose members receive their choice of who occupies which network position to the performance o...
We develop a method to assess the three indicators of transactive memory systems (TMS)—specialization, credibility, and coordination—through computer-aided text analysis. First, human coders assessed group transcripts for phrases representative of these indicators. From those phrases, we identified words that occurred frequently to develop a dictio...
To successfully generate creative solutions, teams must reconcile inconsistent perspectives and integrate competing task demands. We suggest that adopting a paradoxical frame - a mental template that promotes recognizing and embracing the simultaneous existence of seemingly contradictory elements - helps teams navigate this process to produce creat...
Knowledge transfer within organizations has important implications for organizational performance and competitive advantage. In this virtual special issue, we review articles on this topic published in Organization Science between 2014 and 2020 and identify 53 articles for their theoretical and empirical contributions. These articles examine knowle...
Background: Many critical care interventions that require teamwork are adopted slowly and variably despite strong evidence supporting their use. We hypothesize that educational interventions that target the entire interprofessional team (rather than professions in isolation) are one effective way to enhance implementation of complex interventions i...
This study advances understanding of the conditions under which a new worker improves organizational performance. We argue that the extent to which new group members have experience working as specialists or generalists is a critical factor in explaining performance after the new member joins. We conceptualize specialists as those who concentrate o...
We trace the evolution of research on organizational learning. As organizations acquire experience, their performance typically improves at a decreasing rate. Although this learning-curve pattern is found in many industries, organizations vary in the rate at which they learn. In order to understand this variation, we separate organizational learnin...
This study investigates how the information that individuals accumulate through helping others in a customer support crowdsourcing community influences their ability to generate novel, popular, and feasible ideas in an innovation crowdsourcing community. A customer support crowdsourcing community is one in which customers help each other develop so...
This article discusses the concept of organizational learning – that is, the process by which an organization acquires knowledge through experience. The opening section gives a brief definition of the term. The article then goes on to discuss learning by doing, in which an organization learns as a result of its own actions. It then goes on to discu...
We theorize that the effect of membership turnover on group processes and performance depends on a group’s communication network. We describe two mechanisms through which communication networks affect group performance: (1) the number of direct communication paths and (2) the clarity of the coordination logic. These mechanisms map onto two network...
Intraorganizational learning involves the processes through which organizational units (e.g., groups, departments, or divisions) change as a result of experience. The units could learn from their own direct experience or from the experience of other units. For example, a hospital surgical team might acquire knowledge about how to use new technology...
This chapter compares and contrasts the effects of two knowledge repositories, routines and transactive memory systems (TMSs), on knowledge creation, coordination, retention and transfer. We provide overviews of research on the two knowledge repositories, with particular attention to how they form and change. We then discuss the relationship betwee...
Organizational learning includes processes of creating, retaining and transferring knowledge and has implications for the performance and competitiveness of organizations. Given the knowledge-based view of resources inherent in management of technology (MOT), in this paper, we adopt an organizational learning framework that considers knowledge to b...
Considerable research has established the superior performance of teams on which team members utilize specialized knowledge and also develop transactive processes that promote coordination. Less is known, however, about the consequences for team performance when team members only possess one of the two productivity factors. We develop and test a fr...
This article describes advances in the study of knowledge transfer in organizations over the fifteen years since Argote and Ingram (2000) appeared in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Argote and Ingram developed mechanisms of knowledge transfer and discussed factors that facilitate or impede transfer. Conditions under which know...
This article discusses the concept of organizational learning – that is, the process by which an organization acquires knowledge through experience. The opening section gives a brief definition of the term. The article then goes on to discuss learning by doing, in which an organization learns as a result of its own actions. It then goes on to discu...
Extending research on organizational learning to multiproduct environments is of particular importance given that the vast majority of products are manufactured in such environments. We investigate learning in a multiproduct facility drawing on exceptionally rich data for a manufacturing firm that is a leading producer of high-technology hardware c...
Behavioral theories of organization are a major portion of the field of organizational studies, as behavioral reasoning is found across a range of theoretical approaches. We review the role of behavioral theory in the major research traditions of organization theory, starting with the original behavioral theory of the firm and continuing to evoluti...
In order to make quality strategic decisions, managers need a deep understanding of industry dynamics and enterprise capabilities. In this book, we present a conceptual framework that will help executives lead their organizations in highly competitive global markets. For some, it will change frames of reference and accepted priorities in terms of w...
Many organizations have launched online knowledge-exchanging communities to promote knowledge sharing among their employees. We empirically examine the dynamics of knowledge sharing in an organization-hosted knowledge forum. Although previous researchers have suggested that geographic and social boundaries disappear online, we hypothesize that they...
This chapter analyzes the effects of the geographic distribution of organizational units on organizational learning and knowledge transfer. Studies that examine the effect of geographic distribution on learning and knowledge transfer processes and outcomes are discussed and an analysis encompassing both single and multi-unit organizational forms is...
The concept of transactive memory systems affords an opportunity for organizational learning and global strategy researchers to learn from each other to their mutual benefit. A transactive memory system is a collective system for encoding, storing, and retrieving information. Teams with well-developed transactive memory systems have been found to p...
Many companies obtain new product ideas from their customers through innovation crowdsourcing. This study investigates how simultaneously participating in two crowdsourcing communities hosted by one firm, a customer support community and an innovation crowdsourcing community, affects an individual’s ability to generate novel, popular, and implement...
This chapter presents evidence that characteristics of the organizational context affect organizational learning and knowledge retention and transfer. The organizational context interacts with experience to affect organizational learning and the retention and transfer of knowledge acquired through learning. The organizational context can facilitate...
A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (Cyert & March, 1963) laid a conceptual foundation for the application of the “Carnegie School” approach to studying and understanding organization- level behavior and outcomes. The book has exerted enormous influence across fields such as organization theory, business strategy, economics, and organizational sociolog...
We analyze performance and emotions as antecedents and consequences of team strategic decisions to explore a new routine versus exploit an existing routine. In a laboratory study, we examine team decision making over time and draw causal inferences about the relationships among team emotions, team performance, and explore-exploit decisions. We use...
This concluding chapter discusses the relationships across learning at different levels of analysis and across different dimensions of experience. Managerial and strategic implications of research findings on organizational learning are developed. The chapter concludes with a discussion of promising future research directions that are likely to adv...
What do organizations learn as they gain experience in production? Where is this knowledge embedded within organizations? What are the consequences of where knowledge is embedded for organizational performance? This chapter begins with a discussion of what is learned as groups and organizations gain experience. A more general discussion of organiza...
Do organizations forget? Or do organizations retain the knowledge they acquire as time passes? The classic learning curve assumes that organizational knowledge is cumulative and persists indefinitely through time. Yet, individuals leave organizations. Records can be lost or misplaced. Technologies become obsolete and/or inoperative. Social networks...
“Learning curves” have been found in many organizations. As organizations produce more of a product, the unit cost of production typically decreases at a decreasing rate. A learning curve for the production of an advanced military jet built in the 1970s and 1980s is shown in Fig. 1.1. The number of direct labor hours required to assemble each jet a...
This chapter presents a theoretical framework for analyzing organizational learning that was developed in Argote and Miron-Spektor (2011). According to the framework, organizational experience is theorized to interact with the organizational context to create knowledge. The chapter discusses components of the framework, including experience, the or...
Cisco Systems, Inc. successfully acquired many software firms with 50–100 employees (Wysocki, 1997). Cisco paid a premium for the firms—on the order of two million dollars per employee. Why is Cisco paying so much for these firms? According to Wysocki
Great Ormond Street Hospital in Great Britain learned from Ferrari racing crews how to handle patient handovers or transitions from one unit to another more effectively and, thereby, improved patient care (Naik, 2006). General Motors Corporation built identical plants in Argentina, Poland, China, and Thailand so that knowledge acquired at one plant...
Researchers have identified three indicators of the existence of transactive memory systems (Lewis, 2003; Moreland et al., 1998): knowledge or memory specialization (the tendency for group members to remember different aspects of a task or to develop specialized and complementary expertise), task credibility (how much group members trust each other...
Research on organizational learning and knowledge management has increased dramatically over the last 20 years. This chapter discusses reasons for the surge in research, describes approaches to defining organizational learning and knowledge, and discusses levels at which learning occurs. It presents major findings about creating, retaining, and tra...
We analyze learning and knowledge transfer in a computing call center. The information technology (IT) technical services provided by call centers are characterized by constant changes in relevant knowledge and a wide variety of support requests. Under this IT problem-solving context, we analyze the learning curve relationship between problem-solvi...
Many organizations have launched online knowledge forums to promote knowledge flow across boundaries. This paper theorizes and empirically tests whether employees transfer knowledge within or across boundaries and how the tendencies change as a function of a knowledge provider’s experience in an online forum. We suggest that participants prefer to...
Purpose – We explore two characteristics of groups in today's work environments, membership dispersion and geographic dispersion, and the effects that these conditions have on group and organizational learning.
Approach – We integrate findings on group membership dispersion and geographic dispersion and develop predictions of dispersion's effects o...
The research examined how knowledge embedded in an organization's structure can persist over time and buffer the organization from the disruptive effects of turnover. We hypothesized that turnover would affect the performance of organizations that are low in structure more than those that are high in structure. By contrast, we expected to see littl...
Organizational learning has been an important topic for the journal, Organization Science, and for the field. We provide a theoretical framework for analyzing organizational learning. According to the framework, organizational experience interacts with the context to create knowledge. The context is conceived as having both a latent component and a...
In this introductory paper, I discuss the goals and motivations for the special issue New Perspectives in Organization Science, which coincides with the 20th anniversary of the journal Organization Science. Senior editors of Organization Science provide their perspectives on topics that are important to the field. The papers identify current themes...
The article provides a brief overview of past research on organizational learning. Current research themes are identified, including taking a fine-grained approach to characterizing organizational experience, understanding the role of the organizational context in organizational learning, and analyzing processes and outcomes of knowledge creation,...
Over two decades have passed since Wegner and his co-authors published the groundbreaking paper on transactive memory systems (TMS) in 1985. The concept attracted the interest of management, psychology, and communication scholars who have employed a variety of methods to examine the phenomenon. In this paper, we review 76 papers that examined trans...
The task performance of laboratory work groups whose members were trained together or alone was investigated. Groups whose members were trained together recalled more about the assembly procedure and produced better-quality radios than groups whose members were trained individually. The results indicated that group training improved group performan...
How does prior experience influence team creativity? We address this question by examining the effects of task experience acquired directly and task experience acquired vicariously from others on team creativity in a product-development task. Across three laboratory studies, we find that direct task experience leads to higher levels of team creativ...
This study examines whether developers learn from their experience and from interactions with peers in OSS projects. A Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is proposed that allows us to investigate (1) the extent to which OSS developers actually learn from their own experience and from interactions with peers, (2) whether a developer's abilities to learn from...
This chapter presents a theoretical framework for the effects of prior task experience on team creativity. We distinguish among different types of experience within teams, namely direct and indirect prior task experience. We argue that different types of prior task experience differentially influence team creativity, and that the prior experience–c...
This chapter discusses how a shared superordinate identity increases knowledge creation and transfer in firms. It presents evidence, from both the field and laboratory, that sharing a superordinate identity promotes knowledge creation and transfer. It develops theory about the conditions under which a shared superordinate identity is most valuable....
The article discusses the need for corporations to both produce innovations and implement them within their existing systems, goals which can seem mutually exclusive. The rubric of paradoxical cognition is recommended for increasing motivation and framing contradictions constructively. The results of a study which indicated that paradoxical cogniti...
To understand how teams develop transactive memory systems, we investigated the relationships among TMS, motivation, and identity. We discovered that individual motivation influenced positively the development of TMS only when group identification was high. When group identification was low, individual motivation had a negative effect on the develo...
Research on Groups in OrganizationsA Reformulation: The Nature of Groups in Organizational ContextsFormation ProcessesCoordination ProcessesAdaptation ProcessesLearning ProcessesTemporal and Contextual IssuesConcluding Comments
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKCONCLUSIONACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I n this introductory piece, we take stock of the impact of Cyert and March's A Behavioral Theory of the Firm, describe current research trends in the behavioral tradition, and introduce the special issue's papers. A Behavioral Theory of the Firm is one of the most influential management books of all time. In the book, Cyert and March developed the...
This Crossroads section continues the Organization Science tradition of providing a forum for discussing issues central to our understanding of organizations. Dan Levinthal and Claus Rerup begin the conversation in their essay “Crossing an Apparent Chasm: Bridging Mindful and Less-Mindful Perspectives on Organizational Learning.” Karl Weick and Kat...
This study examined the effects of turnover and task complexity on group performance. Two hundred and forty subjects arranged into three-person groups performed a production-type task for six experimental periods. The design was a 2 (Turnover vs. No Turnover) × 2 (Simple vs. Complex Task) × 2 (Male vs. Female) × 6 (Periods) factorial with repeated...
Our work integrates organizational learning research with information systems research and empirically tests whether new information technology (IT) contributes to an organization's ability to retain knowledge accumulated through experience as well as to transfer knowledge between firm locations. We conducted a cross-sectional time series analysis...
revious studies have provided evidence of the positive impact of transactive memory (TM) on group per- formance, such as the efficient storage and recall of knowledge and better product quality. This paper aims to unify the experimental research on TM and to extend it to more dynamic and diverse group settings. In this paper, we develop an empirica...
Learning by doing represents an important mechanism through which organizations prosper. Some firms, however, learn from their experience at a dramatic rate, while other firms exhibit very little learning at all. Three factors have been identified that affect the rate at which firms learn: (a) the proficiency of individual workers, (b) the ability...
The commentary reflects on two essays on managing learning and knowledge in organizations. The essay on organizational learning was written by Friedman, Lipshitz, and Popper; the essay on knowledge management was written by Hazlett, McAdam, and Gallagher. Key points in the two essays are highlighted and points of convergence discussed. Opportunitie...
Our research integrates organizational learning research with information systems research and empirically tests whether new information technology (IT) contributes to an organization's ability to learn from experience as well as to transfer knowledge between firm locations. We conducted a cross-sectional time series analysis of detailed monthly da...
The study examines the effects of social identity and knowledge quality on knowledge transfer across groups. One hundred and forty-four students performed a production task in three-person groups. Midway through the task, a member from a different group rotated into each group. The primary dependent variable was whether the group adopted the produc...
This editorial describes the objectives of Organization Science and the kind of manuscripts that we hope to attract to the journal. Previous Editors-in-Chief are acknowledged and thanked for the excellent jobs they have done and for the superb reputation that the journal developed under their leadership. Incoming Senior Editors and members of the E...
The commentary discusses connections between Jelinek’s analysis of strategic change and research on organizational learning. Points of convergence and divergence between the strategic change case and the organizational learning literature are identified in three areas: the role of experience in organizational learning, knowledge transfer within and...
This chapter explores why some groups or organizations are better than others at learning from experience. It discusses factors found to facilitate or impede the rate at which groups and organizations learn. It pays particular attention to the role of experience and examines whether certain patterns of experience are more conducive to group or orga...
In this concluding article to the Management Science special issue on ÜManaging Knowledge in Organizations: Creating, Retaining, and Transferring Knowledge,Ý we provide an integrative framework for organizing the literature on knowledge management. The framework has two dimensions. The knowledge management outcomes of knowledge creation, retention,...
To investigate the conditions under which learning-by-hiring (or the acquisition of knowledge through the hiring of experts from other firms) is more likely, we study the patenting activities of engineers who moved from United States (U.S.) firms to ...
In this book, the editors and a team of distinguished international contributors analyse the nature of organizational capabilities, studying how organizations do things, use their knowledge base, and diffuse that knowledge in competitive environment. Offering both theoretical analysis and detailed evidence from a variety of individual firms and sec...
Transactive memory systems refer to the idea that people in continuing close relationship develop a shared system for encoding, storing and retrieving information from different substantive domains. Previous studies provide both direct and indirect evidence of the positive impact of transactive memory systems on group performance, such as the effic...
This concluding chapter of Volume 3 of Research in Managing Groups and Teams: Technology identifies themes in research on groups and technology represented in the volume. The chapter also discusses the implications of changes in group structures and processes enabled by technology for four fundamental features of groups: interdependence, social ide...
In an effort to improve their competitiveness, many organizations have become more dynamic. One feature of such organizations is teamwork, but teams in dynamic organizations differ in certain ways from more traditional work teams. Many of these differences have implications for knowledge management, especially transactive memory. Transactive memory...
La finalité de notre article est de comprendre la nature et la diversité des relations intervenant dans le processus de diffusion interorganisationnelle des connaissances. Notre questionnement porte dans un premier temps sur la nature des dimensions de ces relations et dans un second temps sur leur diversité. L’intérêt est double : préciser et comp...
On the basis of a step-by-step procedure (see Hinkin, 1998), this article discusses the design and evaluation of a self-report questionnaire (Change Climate Questionnaire) that can be used to gauge the internal context of change, the process factors of change, and readiness for change. The authors describe four studies used to develop a psychometri...
Why do some organizations learn at faster rates than others? Why do organizations "forget"? Could productivity gains acquired in one part of an organization be transferred to another? These are among the questions addressed in Organizational Learning: Creating, Retaining and Transferring Knowledge. Since its original publication in 1999, this book...
