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Introduction Making effective use of the collective knowledge in a company is often seen as a challenge that arises mostly at the organisational level. Issues such as leveraging best practices throughout the organisation and fostering or exploiting core competencies have often been debated in knowledge management literature (see for example Cerny, 1996). In our experience with several companies, however, managing knowledge is already a major challenge at the team level. Therefore, we developed a framework displaying the relevant layers of team knowledge management (see figure 1).  Figure 1: Team knowledge management framework The model, put to work by a team leader, should help to avoid the following problems: Team members were not aware of previous experiences of their team mates or their special skills. New team members who joined an existing team were not aware of crucial events (and subsequent learnings) that happened prior to their arrival in the team. One new team member we interviewed indicated that he felt he "went blindly into the project." There was a lack of knowledge about stakeholders and their goals in respect to the team’s work. Knowledge that individual team members had acquired externally or developed themselves was not sufficiently shared with other team members. Many team members we interviewed indicated that due to time pressure, they often felt insufficiently briefed by other team members and did not understand their tasks, problems, and results. Collective knowledge creation was often difficult due to time, language or co-ordination problems. One team member we interviewed indicated that he felt frustrated because he realised that "the team was not going down a learning curve together." The teams did not gather and combine their insights into the overall process systematically and did not deduce lessons learned for future activities. When we questioned project team leaders whether they gathered lessons learned at the end of a phase or an entire project, the most common answer was "we ought to, but rarely have the time or inclination." In order to address these problems, a team leader has to provide the team with real and virtual communication spaces and with a set of guiding norms. He needs to assure that the four core team knowledge processes can take place, namely a team knowledge assessment or audit, team knowledge development (creation and acquisition of new knowledge), mutual briefings and updates, and systematic reviews or lessons learned sessions. In order to improve these processes, the team leader has a number of tools at his disposal, such as the team matrix, the expert web, the project compass, visual protocolling, or lessons learned repositories. A last vital element in addressing these problems is the team head’s leadership function: a team leader has to create an environment for trust and identification by creating collective experiences and artefacts. He has to create a sense of urgency to align team members towards completing a common (ambitious but realistic) goal, while at the same time allowing time for crucial reflection processes. For examples and a more detailed description of these five necessary layers, please feel free to contact Oliver Sukowski at oliver.sukowski@unisg.ch. Enabling Factors for Team Knowledge Management The framework for team knowledge management illustrated in figure 1 has to be viewed in the context of certain enabling factors within the team and the organisation. Korine (1999) points out that due to substitution of bureaucratic structures with team organisation, management faces new challenges resulting from arbitrary behaviour of team members. In order to avoid this, Korine identified enabling factors for effective team management: "By stressing respect for team autonomy, making decision processes public, and encouraging challenge and gamesmanship at all levels, [...] managers have created novel, non-bureaucratic ways of addressing arbitrariness." In our work with various teams, we also encountered frustration and demotivation due to a lack of sufficient team autonomy. One team member described the situation as follows: "Decision making by higher level management is just like a black box to us. We have no idea about the reasoning behind their decisions and yet the team has to live with them and be compensated accordingly." Thus, arbitrary decision making in and between teams is one of the major sources for performance problems and distrust in teams. We will get back to this crucial point in the conclusion of the article, where we summarise the enabling factors of team knowledge management. Another frequently neglected factor in our experience with teams is the deployment of a performance measurement and incentive system that encourages knowledge transfer within the team and does not create incentives for unhealthy internal competition. Pure individual compensation can limit the knowledge transfer among team members significantly. The integration of a team bonus into the compensation scheme can foster additional willingness to share knowledge in a team. A third enabling factor for team knowledge management is continuity. Continuity in the sense of a stable team composition and sufficient, on-going resource endowment. A stable team composition can lead to the development of highly complementary skills in a team which in turn lead to high levels of performance. Team continuity can also lead to a higher level of trust in a team, because the team members have a set of shared experiences (for this point, we refer again to the seminal analysis of trust in Lewicki and Bunker, 1996). This higher level of trust, as mentioned before, is a prerequisite for knowledge transfer. Sufficient resource endowment can give the team the necessary room for reflecting on the procedures of the team e.g the derivation of lessons learned. However, providing sufficient resources should be accompanied by a measurement framework that focuses on the knowledge dissemination process. As one team member put it: "We simply don’t have the time for reflection and knowledge transfer. Management does not seem to be interested in it. What counts is the successful completion of the operational tasks." This enabling factor is closely linked to what von Krogh calls "care for knowledge creation". In his article on knowledge creation, von Krogh emphasises the necessity to deploy incentive systems focusing on behaviour that builds up care in organisational relationships. Von Krogh suggests care among organisation members to be of paramount importance for the creation of knowledge. In order to foster care in an organisation, he stresses many issues present in our model, such as values and norms (trust, openness, and courage as explicitly stated values by top management), lessons learned gathering (project debriefings) and regular interactions in the same physical space (social events). In addition, he also proposes mentoring and training programs as a means of fostering care for knowledge creation. Having outlined the advantages of continuity for team knowledge management and especially team knowledge development, one should not forget the possible dangers that lie in team continuity. Long term team consistency with little or no new input from outside can also be the source for potential hazards to team performance. This danger is frequently referred to as "Groupthink" (Janis, 1982): Group phenomena such as pressure on dissenters, the illusion of invulnerability of the group, and ignoring input from outside sources can have substantial adverse influence on team performance. Little perturbations in a team constellation, such as new team members, can therefore have beneficial effects. Another possible solution to this danger is the combination of teams with communities of practice. In this way team members receive outside input to their problems by periodically meeting with specialised peers from other teams. If you have questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact me at: Dr. Martin Eppler
mcm institute for Media and Communications Management
University of St. Gallen
Mueller-Friedberg-Strasse 8
9000 St. Gallen
Switzerland
(tel) ++41 71 / 224 2407
fax) ++41 71 / 224 2771
(email) Martin.Eppler@unisg.ch
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