| dc.description.abstract | Organizations face a whole new competitive environment in the knowledge era. Ever escalating global competition and the rapid changing environment result in a situation where the application of information technologies and knowledge play a critical role in organizational activities. Prior researches reveal knowledge as an important resource in organizations, and knowledge utilization and absorptive capacity are important organizational capabilities. In addition, task force or work-team becomes an important mechanism to respond to heavy competition. Teams are social networks that combine people who have different knowledge breath and depth. Team efficiency and effective are improved through integration of knowledge and collaboration among members within a team. Moreover, cross-functional teams are formed to deal with tasks which require knowledge from different functional unit in an organization, such as new product development, consulting, and information systems development. Members in many cross-functional teams are supposedly heterogeneous in their background, experience, and expertise. They usually have different opinions toward the tasks assigned to them. How to facilitate their cooperation and achieve synergy become critical managerial issues.
This study focuses on knowledge work-teams in organizations and tries to explore how team member diversity affects team performance. First, members with heterogeneous capabilities have to build mutual team cognition. Both team-related cognition and task-related cognition are important. Team-related cognition means the knowledge about other members’ expertise, while task-related cognition is the agreement on how team task should be done. Next, team members’ knowledge and capability should be combined to finish task. Besides, the characteristics of team task might affect how related knowledge and abilities are applied. This study adopts the I-P-O model to discuss the effects of team member diversity on team performance. Two major mediators are team cognition and knowledge integration within the team. Finally, communication effectiveness is employed as a moderator that moderates the effects of team member diversity on team cognition.
Questionnaire was administered to knowledge teams in organizations via the Internet. A valid sample consists of at least 3 team members in the same team. Data were collected from 215 respondents, participating in 71 project teams (samples). Data was analyzed using PLS. There are four major findings in this study. First, to knowledge teams, knowledge integration and task coordination are both positively associated with team performance. Second, both team-related cognition and task-related cognition are helpful to knowledge integration and task coordination. Third, member diversity is positively related to the formation of team cognition. Further analysis shows that only gender diversity and expertise heterogeneity are positively related to team cognition. Finally, communication effectiveness is important to the formation of team cognition; and meanwhile, it moderates the relationship between member diversity and team cognition. Tenure diversity is negatively related to task understanding when the degree of communication effectiveness is low. On the other hand, when the degree of communication effectiveness is high, the relationship between education diversity and team cognition is positive.
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