Proceedings of the 38th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2005
Exploring the Variation in Student Project Team Knowledge Integration Competency Sue Newell Marcy Crary Vicki LaFarge (
[email protected]) (
[email protected]) (
[email protected]) Susan Adams Priscilla Glidden Aaron Nurick (
[email protected]) (
[email protected]) (
[email protected]) Bentley College, 175 Forest Street, Waltham, MA 02452, USA
Abstract Organizations are increasingly using cross-functional project teams to increase flexibility. The belief is that individuals will be able to share and combine their different knowledge and expertise, i.e., integrate their diverse knowledge, in order to develop more creative solutions. However, project teams of all kinds often fail to meet their objectives. In this paper, we explore the knowledge integration process in student project teams and identify what learning tool interventions might facilitate improved knowledge integration. The results from this initial study suggest that teams do differ significantly in their knowledge integration competence and that this is related most strongly to their use of social capital. Reflective learning tools appeared to be helpful in improving this knowledge integration competency. However, teams were more or less able to take advantage of the intervention. Our research, therefore, identifies that an important area for future research is to explore what team factors influence its ability to use learning tool interventions.
1. Introduction Given that knowledge is widely distributed across an organization, bringing people together to work on projects is considered to be a useful way to improve the integration of knowledge. Thus, project-based team work is an organizational form increasingly used in business, whether for designing and implementing a new IT system, developing a new product or service, or managing a consultancy project [9, 12]. The rationale for project team use is that the different knowledge, skills and expertise of team members can be integrated (shared and combined) [26] to create more effective solutions to problems than could be achieved by individuals working independently. Evidence suggests, however, that most projects under perform and do not meet their cost, schedule and/or functionality targets [3, 25] often because teams have problems in effectively utilizing the diversity of knowledge, skills and expertise that exists among
members [13]. In other words, many teams suffer from low knowledge integration competency and are unable to share and combine the different knowledge, skills and expertise potentially present among members for solving problems [27]. Problems of effective team performance and knowledge integration lead most business schools to require their students to work frequently in project teams in the hope that they will develop skills needed to be effective in the workplace. While the pedagogical and practical rationale for this team intensive curriculum has been clear, there has been no systematic evaluation of the relationship between team effectiveness, specific curricular interventions that facilitate cognitive and emotional competency development, and the enhanced knowledge integration competency of the team. The purpose of the research reported in this paper is to better understand the relationship of these variables to each other. In particular, the researchers asked: does the human capital of the team explain a teams’ knowledge integration competency and how, if at all, are teams able to use reflective learning tools to develop and use their human capital in order to improve this knowledge integration competency?
2.1. Teams, Knowledge Integration, and Human Capital Project teams bring together individuals with different backgrounds and experience on the premise that, as a collective, they will be able to share and combine their diverse knowledge and expertise to create a solution that is better than any one individual could have produced alone, or that could have been produced by the individuals working independently on the different tasks [22]. However, teams differ significantly in their ability to combine diverse knowledge and create solutions to problems: that is, in their knowledge integration competency. The knowledge integration potential of a team depends, all other things being equal, on the availability of the human capital needed to accomplish the goals of the project. If the team does not have or cannot access the
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knowledge needed to solve the problems and exploit the opportunities with which it is faced, there will be nothing to combine to create solutions. Two key aspects of human capital are distinguished in the literature – intellectual and social capital [26]. Intellectual capital (IC) refers to the ‘knowledge and knowing capability of the collectivity’ [26; p.245] and represents the adequacy of the team structure and composition, as reflected in the appropriateness of members’ skills and expertise in relation to the objectives of the project. Teams are strong on intellectual capital to the extent that members are selected in order to ensure that there is the diversity of knowledge, skills and expertise that is required for the various tasks that must be completed [32, 35]. Intellectual capital and its diversity across the team are likely to be very important for effective knowledge integration and the successful completion of a project. However, it is not inevitable that a team that has the requisite intellectual capital will be able to work collaboratively together to integrate their diverse skills and knowledge [21]. The concept of social capital helps us to explore the way in which personal relationships are used for the purpose of both accessing information and integrating the intellectual capital of a team [1]. The concept of social capital is widely, but also differently, used by various authors [18]. Generally, it is acknowledged that social capital comprises a structural, a relational and a cognitive component [26]. So social capital is stronger where the network ties are denser (structural), where there is a high level of trust between these ties (relational) and where there is common understanding (cognitive). Conversely, it is weaker where the network links are limited, where there is distrust and where there is divergent understanding. The main source of disagreement that exists is in whether authors focus on internal or external network relations: a ‘bonding’ versus a ‘bridging’ view of social capital [1]. The bridging view sees social capital as a resource inhering in a social network that can be appropriated by a focal actor based on relations with others in the network [7]. Individuals who provide a ‘bridge’ across divided communities (structural holes) are important, since they play a brokerage role. The level of associability between the parties can be relatively limited (structural) and trust can be fragile (relational) [24]. Such weak ties [16] with many external parties can, however, be sufficient to ensure access to information and knowledge (cognitive) from across the organization [17]. The more team members are ‘boundary spanners’, the more access they will have to different ideas and information from across the distributed organization. This can potentially facilitate creative knowledge integration [2, 30]. The ‘bonding’ view, by contrast, focuses on the collective relations among those in a defined group [10]. Team bonding is a measure of the strength of the relations between the project team members. Social capital relates
to the internal structure and relations within this collective. It ensures an internal cohesiveness that allows the collective to pursue shared goals. Thus, to work collaboratively with others requires individuals to adapt their behaviors, unlearn and develop new theories of action [21]. Strong team bonds provide a level of psychological safety [15] that would appear to be a prerequisite for such collaboration. Drawing on the three elements of social capital (structural, relational, and cognitive) [26] - bonding would be at its maximum where each team member is connected by strong relations [16] to each other team member, through frequent communications, where there is a high level of trust between members and where there is considerable knowledge redundancy [28]. Relating these two aspects of social capital to processes of team knowledge integration [19], we can say that effective bridging serves the logistical problem of acquiring information, while bonding serves the interpretative problem of making sense of this information through exchange and dialogue so that knowledge is integrated in a way that can help to solve a problem or exploit an opportunity. In the context of a project team, then, we can conclude that both the bridging and the bonding aspects of social capital are highly relevant in relation to team knowledge integration. In relation to bridging, each individual has a unique network, which will provide a bridge to access the information and knowledge that may be useful to the team as it learns to solve problems and exploit opportunities. The more bridges are used by team members the more novel information and knowledge will be available to the team and so the more opportunities for creative knowledge integration. However, this potential will only be available if there are strong bonds within the team to actually facilitate the sharing and use of this knowledge in a creative way. In this research, we first explore whether these human capital elements do indeed explain different levels of knowledge integration achieved and so performance between teams. There has been little empirical research directly examining this question. However, while this issue of a team’s human capital resources is likely to influence its knowledge integration performance, it is also likely that teams will be able to improve their capacity to exploit these human capital resources that are potentially available. This is precisely what the team development interventions on the focal MBA program are aimed at – improving the ability of the teams to work collaboratively together so that they fully utilize the knowledge, skills and expertise potentially available to them. These interventions are aimed at encouraging teams to reflect on how effectively they are working together and sharing information and knowledge and how they can make adjustments when they identify limitations in their current practices.
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3. Methodology and Context 2.2. Improving the Exploitation of Human Capital Potential in Teams through Reflective Practice Past research has identified how the reflective practices of teams are important for converting tacit experience – derived from intellectual and social capital into explicit team knowledge that can be used to solve problems and exploit opportunities associated with the project task [12]. The reflective practice of a team refers to ‘the processes or means by which project participants make sense of their project experience and its meaningfulness’ [12: p. 6]. Ayas and Zeniuk [4] demonstrate the importance of team reflection for effective team learning. They argue that reflective practices require the use of reflective learning tools. Learning tools are artefacts that can lead to new ways of thinking [34]. In this sense, a learning tool can be considered as a boundary object [8] which functions as an integrating device, helping to transform ‘old knowledge’ into ‘new knowledge’ through a process of perspective-making [5]. Learning tools are a significant part of the learning infrastructure – they are ways of organizing resources and opportunities in order to promote regular reflection and sharing [33]. Okhuysen and Eisenhardt [29] demonstrated how even relatively simple tools can promote reflection that promotes improved knowledge integration. In an experimental laboratory set-up they compared three different formal interventions in terms of how they encouraged or discouraged knowledge integration - Information Sharing, Questioning Others, and Managing Time. They found that the Questioning and Managing Time interventions were helpful in encouraging higher levels of knowledge integration because these interventions operated to attract attention to both adaptive improvements to the team process and task. In this sense these interventions operated as reflective learning tools. In this study we consider a more complex intervention used to encourage teams to reflect on their internal processes as they affect their task-related activities. Specifically, we focus here on how the teams responded to one particular learning tool used to promote reflection – an analysis of two videotapes of their own team meetings. The question of interest was how far this learning tool acted as a boundary object [8] to stimulate reflection that subsequently encouraged the team to more effectively make use of its human capital resources and so integrate knowledge and create an effective solution within the context of the specific project objectives. Figure 1 outlines the model that was derived from this literature review and which underpins our research study.
The research is based on a case study of 6 student teams studying in the 1st year of a 2-year Cohort MBA program. Students in this program all had at least two years of work experience and were diverse in terms of age, nationality, academic training and professional background. As part of a year long Business Process course, teams with members of diverse backgrounds were assigned a complex business process project at a company in which a senior manager was their client. The task of the project teams was to analyze a particular key business process within the company, identify the problems and suggest solutions to senior management. To do this they had to collect data from the company through interviews and/or questionnaires, and then explore this data by applying quantitative and qualitative analysis tools to identify the main bottlenecks and develop recommended solutions. This work required significant knowledge integration to be successful (e.g. identifying sources of data, collecting data through observation, interviewing, company records and online research, combining this information to come up with an effective solution, and drawing up implementation plans). Professors who taught the Business Process course and who were not involved in this research process provided data on their perceptions of how effective the teams had been in accessing and integrating knowledge to develop effective solutions on their consultancy projects. These same teams took the supporting team development course designed to help to prepare them with the team skills to promote team effectiveness. Although grounded in theory, this course was very experiential and tailored to team needs as they evolve. Towards the end of the first semester as well as midway through the second semester, each team videoed a team meeting, observed Figure 1. Factors contributing to effective team knowledge integration
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this video, and reflected upon its implications in a written analysis. We characterized this video assignment as a reflective learning intervention whose effectiveness in improving human capital we hoped to understand. At the end of the year, each individual team member also wrote a reflective essay on their team experience and their team use of the video input. The videos and the reflective essays are used as data in this study. In addition, a survey was designed to capture the level of bridging and bonding of team members as well as their personal reflections on their own teams’ creative knowledge integration effectiveness. Individual student assignment grades in a related course were used as a measure of intellectual capital. Below we use the data collected from the study to consider in turn our two research questions. First, we consider how far the different human capital factors explained differences in perceptions of project team knowledge sharing and project effectiveness. Second, we consider how useful the reflective learning tool of the video assignment was for improving human capital.
4. Case Analysis 4.1. How far did the different human capital factors explain differences in knowledge integration and project team effectiveness? Students completed a questionnaire that had been developed for this study that measured perceptions related to the key human capital variables in which we had interest. Specifically, the computed variables included a measure of perceptions of the internal social capital of the team (bonding), perceptions of the external social capital of the team (bridging), perceptions of the effectiveness of the team’s knowledge integration processes and finally, perceptions of the overall team effectiveness. The question items included in these scales and the alpha scores are provided in the appendix. Our measure of intellectual capital was the grades of individual team members based on results from a key examination. The key question for our analysis was how far the three aspects of human capital – intellectual capital and bridging social capital and bonding social capital explained differences in relation to perceptions of team knowledge integration and overall team effectiveness. Regression analysis was used to examine this issue. Using knowledge integration as the dependent variable and intellectual and social capital bonding and bridging as the independent variables, the results were significant (F=14.155; p=0.000; R Square=0.622), with bonding being the most significant factor related to the perceived level of knowledge sharing achieved by the teams. With perceptions of team effectiveness as the dependent variable and intellectual capital and social capital bonding
and bridging as the independent variables, the overall results were also significant (F=4.48, p=0.001, R Square=0.483), although again it was the team bonding variable which was most strongly linked to team effectiveness. The results of regression analysis indicate that intellectual capital, bridging social capital and in particular bonding social capital, as operationalized in this study, do explain significant amounts of the variance in knowledge integration and overall team effectiveness as reported by team members in the survey. This will be discussed later.
4.2. How useful was the reflective learning tool for improving human capital? Given the difficulties of providing data on all the teams, we next explore the question related to the use of the reflective learning tool, by focusing on the impact of the videos in two teams – the teams that were described as the least and most effective in the consultancy assignment by the professors (N=2) in charge of the course who were not involved in the research study. Such a strategy of selecting cases based on contrast has been used by others [31]. Once the projects had been completed the professors reflected upon what each team had achieved and provided their observations in a tape-recorded meeting. Their evaluations of the teams centered on two criteria: depth and breadth of analysis. Depth was reflected in how much data the team collected and how effective members were in using this data to understand the process being studied. Some of the teams looked at things more superficially while others probed more deeply. In terms of breadth, the professors noted that there were significant differences across the teams in terms of their ability to see the links between the process that they were being asked to study and the larger organizational picture. The professors evaluating the teams developed these criteria of breadth and depth based on their own subjective experience working with these types of teams over a number of years. Interestingly, however, these two criteria reflect the two key aspects of knowledge integration discussed above [19]. First, teams must find effective solutions to the logistical problem of acquiring sufficient information to creatively react to a problem. The professors’ evaluations of breadth of knowledge considered is a reflection of differences between the teams in terms of how effective they were in solving this logistical problem through their bridging activity. Second, teams need to solve the interpretative problem of making sense of this information through exchange and dialogue so that knowledge is integrated in a way that can help to solve a problem or exploit an opportunity. The professors’ evaluations of depth of knowledge analysis is a reflection of how effective the teams were in relation to this
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interpretative problem that depends upon team bonding activity to ensure a dialogue that can lead to creative problem-solving. Having discussed how the teams differed on these two criteria of breadth and depth, the professors were then asked to rank-order the teams based on their overall evaluation of the teams on these two criteria. While the professors discussed how some teams may have been relatively better at gaining access to a breadth of knowledge and relatively worse at providing an in-depth analysis of the knowledge accessed, they were nevertheless able to agree a rank order and while there was some discussion about the ranking of the teams in the middle order, there was complete unanimity in relation to the best and worst teams. The best team was evaluated very highly on both breadth and depth while the worst team was evaluated very poorly on both (see below). The rank order produced was: 1. FinCo 2. MTSCo 3. CoachCo 4. SeaCo 4. MusicCo 6. CommCo This rank ordering of the teams was used as the basis for selecting the two contrasting cases – FinCo and CommCo. While the professors noted that some of the teams did not get as much support from the sponsor organization, they also noted that these two teams did not really differ in this respect, making them suitable for a case comparison. In addition, we used all the various data sources described above to explore the differences between the two teams in terms of their abilities to make use of the reflective learning tool and to integrate knowledge. In order to ensure that the differences were not simply due to the different level of abilities within the teams, we first compared the average test scores of team members on one of the key examinations associated with this project course. The difference between the team scores was not significant. Interestingly, the FinCo team had one of the lowest average scores, suggesting that cognitive ability per se was not a key factor in their success at integrating knowledge for this project. In terms of the other variables, measured by the self-perception questionnaires, the only significant difference across the teams was in relation to the bridging activity (F=3.07, p=0.008). While FinCo does not always score most positively on each of the measures nor CommCo most negatively, CommCo always scores more negatively than does FinCo. On the key variable of knowledge integration, FinCo scores the highest of all the groups and CommCo scores the lowest. It is also interesting to note how the different measures were reflected in faculty perceptions of the different teams. For example, the SeaCo team was described as ‘overly cohesive’ and
‘overly confident’ about their performance. This is reflected in this team’s high scores on both the bonding measure and the team effectiveness perceptions. CoachCo was described as having a particularly difficult relation with their sponsor organization and this is reflected in their very low bridging score compared to MTSCo which had a very good relation with their sponsor. This provides some evidence of the external validity of these computed measures. 4.2.1. Contrasts in knowledge integration Below we provide more detailed information about the contrasting success of these two teams in relation to their knowledge integration achievements. CommCo – This team consulted on the literaturefulfillment process in a financial services company. CommCo has to send out literature to their investors and stockbrokers. The person the team was dealing with was the individual in charge of this process. The process was problematic because the wrong literature was often available – too much or too little compared to what was required - which meant that a lot of literature was thrown away because it was surplus to requirements, while other clients did not get sent what they needed. The sponsor wanted to rethink the process so that he had the literature he wanted when he needed it to fulfill the client’s request, and not have a big surplus of literature at the end of the year. The CommCo team focused on this process in isolation from what was happening in other parts of the organization. This meant that they were not able to appreciate the linkages between the literature fulfillment process and the larger picture at the company. For example, a big interacting factor in relation to the literature-fulfillment problem related to the incentive structure for the marketing department. If the department did not spend their yearly budget it would be cut the following year. This provided them with the incentive to buy more literature and they did not co-ordinate enough with the person in charge of the literature fulfillment process to ensure that they were buying the right literature. While this clearly had an impact on solving the problems related to the literature fulfillment process, the CommCo team honed in on the fact that the company was not using their ERP system to its full potential. The reason for this was that the company had purchased a manufacturing ERP system and it did not really fit their particular industry context. The students saw this as the solution. The professors commented that “they did not really think about the bigger issue.” They ignored the compensation and incentive issues and how this process fitted in to the entire organization and its mission and strategy. The professors concluded, “There was just such a rich environment, a rich opportunity, but they did not take advantage of it.”
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Even in relation to the ERP solution offered, the CommCo team did not consider what specific aspect of the ERP system could help. As the professor commented, “I gave them some manuals to help them dig into this a bit more but they were not willing to do this, to find what was the solution “beyond implement ERP more’’. In other words, with this team there were many issues related to their project which they did not really address or addressed only at a very surface level. The professors concluded, “They had some pieces but they weren’t making the connections”; “There were some big issues in this project which they simply didn’t get to”; “They were taking things as given too much and not delving beyond this and looking at how this fitted in to the big picture and they needed to do this.” FinCo – This team looked at a customer enquiry management process within the mutual funds department of another financial service company. The team members collected a large amount of data to understand this process and were very detail-oriented in analyzing this data. Indeed, they collected so much data that the professors had to help them to think about the best way to present it all. Moreover, not only did they collect detailed information about the process they were considering, they also recognized that they needed to understand this process within the larger organizational context. The comment from the professor in relation to this team was that “they made the connection between this process (the customer enquiry management process) and FinCo’s bottom line.” "They asked, 'What impact does this have on FinCo if they don’t do this process well?' so they were able to put it in the context of the bigger picture themselves." In other words, this team did the detailed analysis of the particular process, but they also made the connection between this process and the larger corporate picture. The team offered a 2-stage solution. In the shortterm they recognized that FinCo needed a better process to keep track of how they were dealing with customers. They recommended the introduction of a simple triage system to capture the data on customer enquiries. They also offered a more long-term solution focused on how FinCo could more effectively deal with customer enquiries that would actually improve performance. Given these very different levels of knowledge integration, we next explore how the two teams used the learning tool interventions that were designed to help them reflect upon and improve their team processes. 4.2.2. Differences in team interaction and knowledge sharing as perceived by team members. The professor in charge of the team development course, also a member of the research team, watched all the team videos and commented extensively on her observations in written feedback to each team. Before receiving this feedback, each team had also prepared a written analysis of the dynamics observed in the video including a section on
areas for improvement and change. An additional component of the written analysis required for the second video was a section comparing and contrasting the team dynamics in the two videotapes. Students in the course, therefore, had considerable opportunity to reflect on their team dynamics. In addition to the video analysis, students wrote an individual 8-10 page paper at the end of the course. In order to prompt students to do more than merely describe these team dynamics, the paper assignment asked them to focus on a particular area of interest to them; for example, “The relationship between team norms to team effectiveness”. In addition, the assignment required students to integrate data from the team as well as concepts from class and the readings. These individual papers from team members at FinCo and CommCo focused on a number of different areas and varied in quality of analysis. However, team members did tend to highlight similar themes when writing about their particular team’s dynamics. Members of the FinCo team were fairly critical of their team’s process overall. They all cited two team members (one male and one female) as being very dominant in the team. The members outside this dominant duo tended to describe a struggle for leadership between the two. They believed that this dominance often prevented others from speaking. One team member described himself and two other members as having lost “our voice boxes”. Another member of the less dominant subgroup entitled her paper, “On the FinCo of life, there are passengers and there are drivers” and described the dominant duo as highly motivated, sometimes “pulling out the best, highest quality work” and other times using their motivation “as a weapon rather than a tool, blocking the group’s progress and learning”. In contrast, the dominant members saw themselves not so much struggling for leadership against each other, but rather as having had leadership thrust upon them. The dominant male described himself as playing both the role of father and mother in the team--- focusing on both task and socio-emotional needs of the group. The dominant female described her frustration at feeling burdened by a responsibility to initiate recommendations in order for the team to get something done. In spite of their criticism of the team’s process, the FinCo team did see themselves as becoming more effective as a team over time and as producing effective results. They attributed this success to several factors • A shared commitment to producing excellent results • Identification and utilization of each individual member’s strengths when demanded by the project • Ability to learn from experience: in particular, from viewing and acting on the first videotape in which the team was not particularly effective in utilizing the resources of all its members or in organizing itself to get work done. As a result of viewing the first tape, the team described itself as
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Increasing engagement by all members Organizing itself with a clear agenda prepared in advance o Managing its agenda effectively to get work done o Sharing responsibility for getting work done o Trusting the abilities of other team members o Being more willing to express disagreement and think critically The members of the CommCo team were less critical of their team overall than their counterparts at FinCo. While they recognized problems in the team’s process, their criticism tended to be more muted. All the team members described the team’s processes as being dominated by two members, one very vocal American female and one American male. However, in contrast to the FinCo team, this duo tended to work as a team supporting each other in leading the group. These two team members, although not particular friends outside of the team, did not compete against each other within the team and rarely disagreed. In comparison to this duo, the other members of the team (one American male and two Asian females) described themselves as more reserved, less likely to speak up, and therefore, less influential in the team’s process and project. Team members described the cultural differences within the team as having a significant effect. Neither of the two Asian women was particularly fluent in spoken English and this, combined with the more vocal tendencies of the dominant duo, tended to “silence” them. After viewing the videotape, the team focused on the following dynamics as problematic in the team. • Unequal participation among members with two of the five members (the dominant duo) being particularly active and two (the Asian women) being particularly quiet • Difficulties in developing a specific agenda in advance • Difficulties in sticking to an agenda when developed • Difficulties in managing time effectively to reach goals and a tendency to put things off until the last minute In response to this analysis, the team developed strategies to try to correct the problems such as assigning someone to prepare an agenda, using “Round Robin brainstorming” to encourage more equal participation, and having one of the Asian women act as team facilitator in an attempt to minimize the dominance of the American female. In comparing its first videotaped meeting to its second videotape, the team members described these interventions as important and helpful, especially in giving the quieter members more voice in the team. The initial patterns developed in the team, however, were difficult for them to break completely and the team members believed that these patterns continued to have o o
considerable impact on the team’s ability to be effective. For example, the dominant duo still sometimes spoke over the others and the dominant American male tended to usurp the facilitation role, disempowering the Asian female. The procrastination tendencies, particularly of the dominant American male, also seemed to remain as a problem for the team. In comparison to final papers of the FinCo team, those of the CommCo team were much less focused on performance issues—how well the team actually did in completing its task. Although this is not particularly surprising given the requirement of the paper to focus on team dynamics, it is a noteworthy difference reflecting the difference in the team culture of the two teams.
5. Discussion and Conclusions The teams in this study were more or less effective in achieving the business process analysis with which they had been tasked. More specifically, the FinCo team did both a more detailed and more inclusive analysis than did the CommCo team. In this paper, we have considered this in terms of the differing levels of knowledge integration competency achieved by the teams. The results of our study suggest that this differing team level ability to integrate knowledge is related to its human capital potential. In particular, the quantitative analysis suggests that the teams’ ability to develop and use its bonding social capital [10] was crucial. This bonding is important because it allows the team to combine the diverse knowledge and expertise of the different members and so engage in a more generative or creative form of knowledge integration [11]. Where this bonding is more limited team members are more likely to work in isolation and to adopt a more mechanistic approach to knowledge integration [23] that does not fully utilize the skills and knowledge of the individual team members. So, the rationale for bringing individuals together in a team is to provide access to the distributed knowledge that will be needed for project success. However, while team members have different knowledge that is potentially available to the team, that potentiality is only realized if team bonds are strong enough to allow for high levels of discussion and debate that effectively enrols each individuals’ knowledge. Interestingly, the bridging ability [7] of the team and its intellectual capital were less significantly related to its knowledge integration capability. Intellectual capital may be less of an issue in these teams because individuals have already been preselected to join the MBA based, at least in part, on their intellectual capital so that the variance within the total class is relatively small. This means that there will be limited difference in intellectual capital across the teams and so may explain why intellectual capital was not a significant contributor to knowledge integration. Why bridging was a less significant factor is more difficult to
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understand. Given the importance in these projects of working closely with and extracting distributed information and knowledge from the sponsor organization, bridging should have been a significant factor in project success, as others have found in relation to knowledge integration [27]. We will continue to explore this in our subsequent analysis. Having established that human capital, especially bonding, contributes to the knowledge integration achievement of teams, our next question was to explore how far teams were able to use a reflective learning tool [33] to increase their human capital potential [26]. The video interventions were supposed to act as opportunities for teams to reflect upon the ways that they were using the different skills and knowledge of team members and to generally improve their team process. The two teams that we have considered in detail here did indeed recognize some of their team limitations. However, they differed in the extent to which they were able to make use of this and actually change the way the team operated. The FinCo team was better able to change and become more inclusive so that team members could all contribute their knowledge and skills than was the CommCo team. Thus, FinCo saw their first tape, recognized some of the problems and then made changes, e.g., putting in a better planning process and ensuring that all team members contributed. The CommCo team also recognized some of the problems and put in place process changes, but were less able to fully implement these changes. What the results of this study do not help us explain is why the teams differed in terms of being able to make use of the learning tool intervention provided to improve their knowledge integration competency. Okhuysen and Eisenhardt [29] similarly found that teams differed in terms of their ability to make use of reflective learning interventions.. Again, however, they did not explain these differences. This suggests that future research should be focused on exploring why teams differ in terms of their ability to use learning tools to reflect upon and change their practices. One possible factor that could usefully be considered in future research is the emotional intelligence make-up of the team [6]. Previous research demonstrates the importance of emotional intelligence in effective team interactions [14]. A fruitful line of research might be to consider the impact of this emotional intelligence team make-up on the ability to use reflective learning tools. We might even imagine being able to develop a typology of team emotional intelligence that would provide an indication of what kind of intervention a specific team might find most useful. This would provide a very useful practical contribution as it would mean that learning tool interventions could be tailor-made to suit a particular team. While our research therefore suggests an important need for future research, it does also suggest some practical implications in its own right. A project team’s
effectiveness is measured by how well it delivers against some combination of its agreed-upon scope, quality, cost and time parameters. The value of each of these measures can be calculated in dollars of profit or loss. Thus, managers of projects expend significant resources on diagnosing the causes of their teams’ situational ineffectiveness, and on attempting to intervene with remedies. We believe that there may be several kinds of help for these managers. First, the framework we provide in this paper could enable managers to see how a team’s potential human capital can be “acted on” and improved. The qualitative evidence from both the videos themselves and the reflection papers of students, certainly indicate that student teams were able to improve their knowledge integration competencies with the help of a reflective learning tool, albeit teams differed to the degree to which they were able to do this. In this sense, the video acted as a boundary object [8], helping teams to reflect upon and think about ways to change their group process in order to make them more effective in utilizing the resources available across the different members. In this way the video intervention encouraged perspective-making [5]. This suggests that managers of project teams could strategically use learning tool interventions to encourage team reflection that would enhance performance. While the time taken to observe a video of a team interaction may be considered to be ‘wasted time’, we would argue this time should better be considered time well-spent, given its potential to improve the team process. A related result of understanding the framework is that early project stage planned intervention is likely to achieve better results than late stage crisis intervention, since we know that most teams do most of their work during the last part of the project cycle, when it may be too late to successfully intervene. Second, encouraging teams to engage in reflective learning may help to diagnose potential problems for the team or locate likely gaps in the development of bridging and bonding competencies at the team level. Third, further study of the specific techniques used in the curriculum-based interventions seems likely to reinforce what we already know about team assessment and reflection on its own skills. In particular, managers know that team members should have assigned roles, should develop and agree upon an implementable team performance contract, and should follow known procedures for creating agendas, documenting progress and action items, recording meetings, keeping time, etc. However, few require their teams to build and practice these skills as a matter of routine. Additional research may prove the connection between specific techniques and tools for building reflective competence [4] and give managers the KITA they need to begin requiring these basic skills. One of the purposes of embarking on this research project together as a group of faculty was to develop an
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Proceedings of the 38th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2005
increased understanding of team knowledge sharing and integration processes in project teams and the influences on these processes. This area of research is still being developed so we hope to continue our data collection and analysis to contribute to the academic discussion and to inform our teaching and support of student projects. Based on our analysis of the initial data, we can identify areas for further exploration that optimize both pedagogical and research objectives. First, we need to explore what factors make a team more or less able to use a specific learning tool as a boundary object that can help them improve their knowledge integration competencies. As already suggested considering a team’s emotional intelligence may be useful in this respect. More generally, continued empirical research that looks “close-in” to team’s ability to develop reflective practices will be useful for both research and pedagogical objectives. Second, it would be useful to heighten students’ awareness of how they in fact do manage the process of learning from each other – focusing more explicitly from a cognitive framework on how they integrate the different pieces of information they share with each other to build greater understanding of what they are researching together. Finally, in order to gain deeper understanding of the development of a group’s social capital (and more specifically its bridging and bonding activities) and its impact on the team’s functioning – it might be useful to use some kind of social network analysis to highlight students’ relational ties such as a “Network Assessment Exercise,” [20]. This kind of assessment would have both research and pedagogical uses. In summary, given the increasingly distributed nature of organizations, the ability to integrate knowledge in the context of project teams becomes an important competency. The results from our study demonstrate that teams differ in their knowledge integration competency and that this is related to the teams’ human capital, especially its bonding social capital. Moreover, teams differ in terms of how far they are able to make use of a reflective learning tool and develop and more effectively use their intellectual and social capital. In this age of globalization and networking, the managers that hire MBAs expect them to make a significant positive contribution to the process and outcomes of team-based assignments. We think that applications of past and potential insights from research along the lines we’ve described will help us and these managers to assist the MBAs in realizing this expectation.
[2] Alavi M. and Tiwana A. (2002) ‘Knowledge Integration in Virtual Teams: The Potential Role of KMS’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 53(12), 1029–1037. [3] Appleton, E. (1997) How to survive ERP. Datamation, 43, 3, 50-53. [4] Ayas, K. and Zeniuk, N. (2001) Project-based learning: Building communities of reflective practitioners. Management Learning, 32, 1, 61-76. [5] Boland, R. J. and Tenkasi, R. V. (1995) Perspective making and perspective taking in communities of knowing. Organisation Science, 6, 4, 350-372. [6] Boyatzis, R.E., Stubbs, E.C.and Taylor,S.N. (2002) Learning Cognitive and Emotional Intelligence Competencies Through Graduate Management Education. Academy of Management Journal of Learning and Education, 1, 150-162 [7] Burt, R. (1992). Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. [8] Carlile, P.R., (2002). A Pragmatic View of Knowledge and Boundaries: Boundary Objects in New Product Development. Organization Science, 13, 4, 442-455 [9] Clark, T. and Salaman, G. (1998). Creating the ‘right impression’: Towards a dramaturgy of management consultancy. The Services Industry Journal, 18, 1, 18-38. [10] Coleman, J. (1998). ‘Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital’. American Journal of Sociology, 94, 95-120. [11] Cook S D.N. and Brown J.S. (1999) Bridging Epistemologies: The generative dance between organizational knowledge and organizational knowing. Organization Science, 190, 381-400. [12] DeFillippi R. J. (2001) ‘Introduction: Project-based learning, reflective practices and learning outcomes’, Management Learning, 32(1), 5-10. [13] Donnellon, A (1996). Team Talk: The Power of Language in Team Dynamics. Harvard Business School Press, Boston. MA. [14] Druskat,. V and Wolff, S. (2001). “Emotional Intelligence in Teams”, Harvard Business Review ,March 2001, 81-90. [15] Edmonson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44, 2, 350-394. [16] Granovetter, M. S. (1973). ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’. American Journal of Sociology, 79, 1360-1380.
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[18] Hirsch, P. and Levin, D. (1999). Umbrella advocates versus validity police: A life-cycle model. Organization Science. 10 (2) 199-213. [19] Huber, G. (1999). Facilitating project team learning and contributions to organizational knowledge. Creativity and Innovation Management, 8 (2) 70-77. [20] Ibarra, H. (1995). Race opportunity and diversity of social circles in managerial networks. Academy of Management Journal, 38(3), 673-704. [21] Jassawalla, A. and Sashittal, H. (1999). Building collaborative cross-functional new product teams. Academy of Management Executive, 13 (3), 50-62. [22] Katzenbach, J. R. and Smith, D.K. (1993).The Discipline of Teams. Harvard Business Review, 71(2), 111-120. [23] Knights, D. and Wilmott, H. (1997). The hype and hope of interdisciplinary management studies. British Journal of Management, 8 (9) 9-22. [24] Leana, C. and J. Van Buren (1999). ‘Organizational Social Capital and Employment Practices’. Academy of Management Review, 24, 538-555. [25] Martin, A. and Chan, M. (1996) Information systems project redefinition in New Zealand: will we ever learn? Australian Computer Journal, 28, 1. [26] Nahapiet, J. and Ghoshal, S. (1998) Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. Academy of Management Review, 23, 242-266. [27] Newell, S., Huang, J. and Tansley, C. (forthcoming, 2004). Social Capital and Knowledge Integration in an ERP Project Team: The Importance of Bridging AND Bonding. British Journal of Management. [28] Nonaka, I. (1994) A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation. Organization Science, 5, 14-37. [29] Okhuysen, G.A. and Eisenhardt, K.M. (2002) Integrating Knowledge in Groups: How Formal Interventions Enable Flexibility. Organization Science, 13, 4, 370-386. [30] Pelled, L. and Ledford, J. (1999). Demographic diversity and workplace inclusion. Journal of Management Studies, 36,(7) 1013, 1022. [31] Pettigrew, A.M. (1990) Longitudinal field research on change: theory and practice. Organization Science, 1 (3) 267-92. [32] Schneider, S. and G. Northcraft (1999). ‘Three Social Dilemmas of Workforce Diversity in Organizations: A Social Identity Perspective’. Human Relations, 52, pp. 1445-1467. [33] Senge, P. (1999). Learning leaders. Executive Excellence, 16, 11, 12-14.
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7. Appendix: The Survey Instrument The following variables were computed to test the proposed framework and to compare across the groups (negative items were recoded as appropriate): 1. Team effectiveness – this consisted of responses on four questions (Everyone fulfills their team role effectively; We waste a lot of time in our team meetings; Our team produces its deliverables effectively; Our team does not consistently turn out a quality product). The alpha for this scale was 0.6801. 2. Knowledge integration – this consisted of responses on 8 questions (We trust the information we get from each other; We are willing to share knowledge with each other; We regularly provide each other with updates and information; Project members' expertise is valued; We know what others in the team are doing on the project; Project members share information; We usually know who to go to within the project to gain useful information; Project members expect to exchange information on a regular basis). The alpha on this scale was 0.8635. 3. Bonding – internal social capital – this consisted of responses on 9 questions (We generally get on well socially; We compete against each other; We include everyone in social gatherings; All project members can influence project decisions; We are ready to help each other on this project; We learn a great deal from each other on this project; Project members are more committed to other areas of work than to the project; Project members share the same goals towards the project; The project team is very cohesive). The alpha on this scale was 0.8032. 4. Bridging – external social capital – this consisted of responses on 10 questions (Project members are receptive to ideas from the sponsor organization; Project members trust the information they get from the sponsor organization; Individuals in the sponsor organization are willing to share knowledge and expertise with us; Individuals in the sponsor organization respond quickly to requests for information; Individuals in the sponsor organization provide us with updates and information; We don't know what is going on in the sponsor organization; We learn a lot from people in the sponsor organization; People in the sponsor organization are not committed to our project; We know who to go to in the sponsor organization to gain useful information; We find it difficult to understand what people in the sponsor organization tell us). The alpha on this scale was 0.7979.
[34] Senge, P. (1990). The fifth discipline. Sydney: Random House
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