Knowledge that Transforms

Catherine Durnell Cramton (\The Mutual Knowledge Prob- conditions, the impact of organizational change on subsequent lem and Its Consequences for Dispersed Collaboration\) is Asso- performance and survival, and the consequences of organizational ciate Professor in the School of Management at George Mason structures and dynamics for employees\' careers and the compo- University. She recieved her Ph.D. in organizational behavior from sition of organizations\' work forces. She serves on the editorial Yale University. Her research explores the contemporary chal- boards of Organization Science, Administrative Science Quar- lenges of collaboration and leadership, including distributed work, terly, and the American Sociological Review. Address: Columbia interorganizational collaboration, project team leadership, and the University, Graduate School of Business, 706 Uris Hall, New impact of technology on collaboration. Address: School of Man- York, NY 10027-6902; telephone: (212) 854-4424; e-mail: agement, Mail Stop 5F5, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA [email protected] . 22030-4444; telephone: (703) 993-1814; fax: (202) 318-4319; John C. Henderson (\Understanding `Strategic Learning\': e-mail: [email protected] . Linking Organizational Learning, Knowledge Management, and Sue R. Faerman (\Understanding Interorganizational Cooper- Sensemaking\) is the Richard C. Shipley Professor of Manage- ation: Private-Public Collaboration in Regulating Financial Market ment, Chairperson of the Information Systems Department, and Innovation\) is Professor of Public Administration and Organiza- Director of the Institute for Leading in a Dynamic Economy at tional Studies and Dean of Undergraduate Studies at the University Boston University\'s School of Management. He is a noted at Albany, State University of New York. Her research focuses on researcher, consultant, and executive educator with papers appear- the paradoxical nature of leadership and organizational perfor- ing in many refereed journals. His coauthored book, Knowledge mance. She received her Ph.D. in public administration from the Engine, examines leveraging a firm\'s knowledge assets. His University at Albany, State University of New York. Address: research interests include: managing strategic partnerships, impact Office of Undergraduate Studies-LC30, University at Albany, of the mobile Internet on markets and organizations, and knowl- State University of New York, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany, edge management. Address: Boston University School of Man- NY 12222; telephone: (518) 442-3950; fax: (518) 442-4959; e-mail: agement, 595 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 546H, Boston, MA [email protected] . 02215; telephone: (617) 353-6142; fax: (617) 353-1695; e-mail: James F. Fairbank (\Emulation in Academia: Balancing Struc- [email protected] . ture and Identity\) received his Ph.D. in management and organi- Giuseppe (Joe) Labianca (\Emulation in Academia: Balancing zation, The Pennsylvania State University and is an assistant pro- Structure and Identity\) received his Ph.D. in management and or- fessor of management in the College of Business and Economics ganization, The Pennsylvania State University, and is an assistant at West Virginia University in Morgantown, WV. His current re- professor of organization and management at Emory University\'s search interests are strategic decision making and the management Goizueta Business School in Atlanta, GA. His primary interests are of information technology. Address: College of Business and Eco- in network and cognition research at the intra- and interorganiza- nomics, P.O. Box 6025, Morgantown, WV 26506-6025; telephone: tional levels. Recent projects have investigated the antecedents and (304) 293-7937; fax: (304) 293-5652; e-mail: [email protected] . consequences of disliking others in one\'s social networks at work, Dennis A. Gioia (\Emulation in Academia: Balancing Structure as well as investigating the process of emulation between organ- and Identity\) is Professor of Organizational Behavior, Department zations. He conducts both quantitative and qualitative research, and of Management and Organization, Smeal College of Business Ad- has published in the Academy of Management Journal and Orga- ministration at The Pennsylvania State University. His current nization Science. He is currently serving on the editorial review research and writing interests focus primarily on the cognitive board of the Academy of Management Journal. Address: Goizueta processes of organization members, especially the ways in which Business School, 1300 Clifton Road, Emory University, Atlanta, identity, image, and reputation are involved in organizational GA 30322; telephone: (404) 727-7662; fax: (404) 727-6663; e-mail: sensemaking, sensegiving, and change. His work has appeared [email protected] . in many of the top journals in the field and he has coedited two David P. McCaffrey (\Understanding Interorganizational Co- volumes of original contributions: The Thinking Organization operation: Private-Public Collaboration in Regulating Financial and Creative Action in Organizations. Address: Smeal College of Market Innovation\) is Professor of Public Administration, Public Business, Penn State University, 403 Beam BAB, University Park, Policy, and Organizational Studies at the University at Albany, PA 16802; telephone: (814) 865-6370; fax: (814) 863-7261; e-mail: State University of New York. His research focuses on the orga- [email protected] . nizational dynamics of regulatory systems. He received his Ph.D. Heather A. Haveman (\Organizational Environments in Flux: in sociology from the State University of New York at Stony The Impact of Regulatory Punctuations on Organizational Do- Brook. Address: Department of Public Administration and Policy, mains, CEO Succession, and Performance\) is Professor of Man- University at Albany, State University of New York, 135 Western agement at the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University. Avenue, Albany, NY 12222; e-mail: [email protected] . She received her Ph.D. in organizational behavior and industrial Alan D. Meyer (\Organizational Environments in Flux: The relations from the Haas School of Business Administration at the Impact of Regulatory Punctuations on Organizational Domains, University of California at Berkeley in 1990. Her research inves- CEO Succession, and Performance\) is the Charles H. Lundquist tigates organizations\' responses to shifting internal and external Professor of Entrepreneurial Management at the University of

This multi-method field study examines the relative effects of two kinds of leader behaviors--design choices and hands-on coaching--on the effectiveness of self-managing teams. Findings show that how leaders design their teams and the quality of their hands-on coaching both influence team self-management, the quality of member relationships, and member satisfaction, but only leaders' design activities affect team task performance. Moreover, design and coaching interact, so that well-designed teams are helped more by effective coaching--and undermined less by ineffective coaching--than are poorly designed teams.

This study describes the image of organizing that underlies a complex organization's ability to incorporate streams of innovation with continuing operations. I argue that a mechanistic organization archetype prevents people from seeing in their minds' eyes—from imagining—how to do the work of innovation organizationwide, but that theorists have failed to articulate an alternative to this archetype in its own terms. The study focuses on two elements of organizing: the differentiation and the integration of work. I build grounded theory for an alternate, innovative archetype of organizing by exploring the shared image of work differentiation and integration in twelve firms that vary in innovative ability. I find a fundamentally different image in innovative organizations that is centered on hands-on practice: People understand value creation as a long-term working relationship with customers, in which they apply the firm's skills to anticipate and solve customer problems. This practice is differentiated into distinct problems in value creation, each of which embodies the integral flow of work like a lateral slice, but which situates those problems in their own contexts. People understand themselves to be organized in an autonomous community of practice that takes charge of one of the problems. The communities of practice are integrated by standards for action: vivid, simple representations of value that frame work and that are reenacted in practice. The analysis details this different image of organizing by describing four autonomous communities of practice and contrasting them with the image of organizing found in noninnovative firms. The paper illustrates how this new image straightforwardly organizes and controls innovative work, and how the noninnovative image of differentiation and integration makes this work unimaginable. I conclude that innovation can be incorporated with continuing operations, provided that managers and theorists reimagine the differentiation and integration of work. I offer preliminary ideas for doing so, and suggest some next steps in this research stream.

International joint venture (IJV) research largely omits social and cognitive processes and, hence, overlooks their potentially important implications. This paper presents a four-year longitudinal investigation into the social identification and social enactment processes in a British-Italian, shared management joint venture. Using social identification and social enactment theories as conceptual anchors, the study reveals that national social identities were the dominant sense-making vehicle used by team members, although multiple sources of social identification were possible and present in this IJV. Contextual changes occurred that could be expected to favor organizational (IJV-based) social identities, but the dominant use of nationality-based identities did not change. Our findings suggest that social identity enactments (using particular boundaries to define primary social identities) by team members mediate the relationship of contextual variables, both environmental and structural, with group and organizational outcomes (such as role investment and job satisfaction). Our empirical results shed light on unresolved debates in the IJV literature, e.g., the implications of cultural distance and shared management for IJV performance. This study also contributes to social identity theory by highlighting promising directions for development of contextual and longitudinal dimensions in that research stream.

Replication, a familiar phenomenon sometimes referred to as the “McDonalds approach,” entails the creation and operation of a large number of similar outlets that deliver a product or perform a service. Companies pursuing this strategy are now active in over 60 industries. Although replicators are becoming one of the dominant organizational forms of our time, they have been neglected by scholars interested in organizations. As a result of this neglect, replication is typically conceptualized as little more than the exploitation of a simple business formula. Such a view clouds the strategic subtlety of replication by sidestepping the exploration efforts to uncover and develop the best business model as well as the ongoing assessment that precedes large-scale replication of it. Empirical evidence supports an alternative view of replication strategy as a process that involves a regime of exploration in which the business model is created and refined, followed by a phase of exploitation in which the business model is stabilized and leveraged through large-scale replication. In this paper we present the key elements of a theory of replication strategy. We discuss key aspects of a replication strategy, namely the broad scope of knowledge transfer and the role of the central organization, and the analytical concepts of template and Arrow core as a preamble for specifying hypotheses about the conditions under which a replication strategy is more likely to succeed in a competitive setting. Replication strategy provides unusually transparent examples of the process of leveraging knowledge assets; we exploit this in our concluding discussion.

This paper proposes that maintaining “mutual knowledge” is a central problem of geographically dispersed collaboration and traces the consequences of failure to do so. It presents a model of these processes which is grounded in study of thirteen geographically dispersed teams. Five types of problems constituting failures of mutual knowledge are identified: failure to communicate and retain contextual information, unevenly distributed information, difficulty communicating and understanding the salience of information, differences in speed of access to information, and difficulty interpreting the meaning of silence. The frequency of occurrence and severity of each problem in the teams are analyzed. Attribution theory, the concept of cognitive load, and feedback dynamics are harnessed to explain how dispersed partners are likely to interpret failures of mutual knowledge and the consequences of these interpretations for the integrity of the effort. In particular, it is suggested that unrecognized differences in the situations, contexts, and constraints of dispersed collaborators constitute “hidden profiles” that can increase the likelihood of dispositional rather than situational attribution, with consequences for cohesion and learning. Moderators and accelerators of these dynamics are identified, and implications for both dispersed and collocated collaboration are discussed.