Examining the antecedents of knowledge sharing in facilitating team innovativeness from a multilevel perspective

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Abstract

This paper examines how transformational leadership (TFL) climate influences employees’ team identity and their intentions to share knowledge and how team knowledge sharing intention subsequently influences team innovativeness. Data was collected from 301 employees comprising 52 R&D teams. Hypotheses were tested with both hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) and regression analyses. Results indicated that TFL climate was related to employees’ intention to share knowledge through team identity. At the group level, results supported the relationships between team knowledge sharing intention and team innovativeness. The results also indicated that team knowledge sharing intention mediated the relationship between TFL climate and team innovativeness.

Introduction

Innovativeness, the flexibility and willingness to accept new ways to create knowledge-based solutions, is an increasingly indispensable tool for corporations attempting to cope with the complexity of today's competitive environments. As more and more sectors of the global economy become knowledge-based, the importance of understanding the relationships that logically exist among the social capital of an organization (Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998, Yli-Renko et al., 2001), the knowledge management mechanisms utilized by the organization, and their effects on both individual and team-level creativity and innovation become paramount. While scholars and practitioners have acknowledged the critical role that knowledge sharing plays in creating and maintaining firm effectiveness (e.g. Alavi and Leidner, 2001, Kogut and Zander, 1996, Spender and Grant, 1996, Tsai, 2001), surprisingly few empirical studies have concomitantly examined both the antecedents of knowledge sharing as well as its relationship to organizational innovativeness within this broader context.

At an organizational level, the extant literature has emphasized the effects of managerial practices and organizational culture on knowledge sharing (e.g., Bartol and Srivastava, 2002, Chen and Huang, 2007, Floyd and Lane, 2000). Prior research with more of an individual team member perspective has, in comparison, focused on employees’ personalities and dispositions and their relationships with knowledge sharing (Cabrera et al., 2006, Mooradian et al., 2006, Szulanski, 1996, Yang and Farn, 2009). While both of these streams of research have yielded interesting and useful information, very little attention has been given to the antecedents and consequences of knowledge sharing from a multilevel perspective, despite the acknowledged importance of adopting a cross-level conceptual and analytical perspective on social interactions that involve knowledge sharing in organizational settings (Brass et al., 2004, Siemsen et al., 2007). The purpose of the present investigation was, therefore, to help provide this multilevel perspective on an issue that remains a critical one for both theory and practice. The fundamental question that we address in the present study is whether a climate of transformational leadership (TFL) can facilitate team innovativeness. Although research has frequently examined the effects of leadership on teams, a substantial portion of the prior research has been conducted within a single-level analytical framework. Unfortunately, examining one level at a time prevents one from knowing the relationships involving predictors at two or more levels and an outcome at a single level (Kozlowski & Klein, 2000); thus, we adopted a multilevel approach in this study to test our proposed model.

We believe that the present study will make an important contribution to the leadership, innovativeness and knowledge sharing literatures by providing a more comprehensive, multilevel analysis of several of the potentially important underlying variables. Specifically, as represented in Fig. 1, we examine whether TFL climate influences team members’ knowledge sharing intention through team identity perceptions via hierarchical linear modeling (HLM; Raudenbush & Bryk, 2002); and subsequently whether these enhanced team knowledge sharing intentions can explain the relationship between leadership climate and team innovativeness.

Section snippets

TFL climate and intention to share knowledge

Over 40 years ago Katz and Kahn (1966) suggested that the ability to evoke “performance beyond role requirements” was a critical element for organizations attempting to optimize their functioning. One perspective on this kind of performance enhancement that has proven quite informative is the body of knowledge related to transformational leadership (TFL). TFL develops between the leader and the followers in the form of a climate shared among team members. Under a TFL climate, members may

Participants and procedures

An invitation to participate in the research was sent to 84 companies in Taiwan. The 84 companies were obtained from multiple sources including EMBA program alumni lists and researchers’ personal contacts. Fifty-six companies accepted the request. Survey packages were sent out to each R&D team that was working on a specific project when the data collection was conducted. Each package contained copies of team member questionnaires and one copy of the leader questionnaire. To ensure the anonymity

Results

The means, standard deviations and correlations for the study variables are shown in Table 1. Discriminant validity of each construct was assessed by testing whether or not the square root of the average variance extracted for each construct was greater than the correlations between the construct and other constructs (Fornell & Larcker, 1981). Table 1 shows that the constructs meet this criterion. We calculated the variance inflation factor after mean centering and prior to the calculation of

Discussion

It has become nearly axiomatic that knowledge sharing among team members, especially those who are performing complex, interdependent tasks such as R&D work is essential for maintaining high levels of group and organizational productivity (Haas and Hansen, 2007, Liao, 2008). As such, there is a growing need for research to explore both the antecedents and the consequences of knowledge sharing intentions. Clearly, however, since both intragroup and intergroup communications are embedded in a

Limitations and future research

Although we believe that the results of the present study are a useful addition to the literature, they must be interpreted within the study's methodological limitations. First, an objective measure of team innovativeness was not available to us. Our measure of team innovativeness was obtained from team leaders. We, therefore, do not have data to show that the measure of team innovativeness is related to more “objective” measures of innovativeness (e.g. Lovelace et al., 2001). In an R&D

Yuwen Liu is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Technology Management at Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. She received her Ph.D. in human resource development from the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include international human resource management, knowledge management, and team performance.

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  • Cited by (0)

    Yuwen Liu is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Technology Management at Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. She received her Ph.D. in human resource development from the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include international human resource management, knowledge management, and team performance.

    James S Phillips is a Professor of Management in the C.T. Bauer College of Business, University of Houston. He received his Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from the University of Akron in 1980 and has been with the University of Houston since then. His primary research interests are in the areas of organizational justice, leadership, and motivation.

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