Linda Argote - US grants

Little is known about how and why learning occurs in organizations, whether it persists, and how to transfer it. The proposed research empirically investigates the persistence of learning within organizations and the transfer of learning across organizations. The role of turnover in learning and its persistence are also examined. The analyses are based on data collected from one firm in the aerospace industry producing an advanced jet and from three plants of the same firm in the automotive industry producing a light truck. The research estimates production functions with variables included to assess the importance of persistence, transfer and labor turnover in affecting the efficiency of the production process. In addition to testing whether learning persists, whether it transfers, and whether turnover is related to the rate of learning, the research aims to develop a theoretical model of learning in organizations that integrates and explains the empirical findings. The research will advance scientific knowledge about why learning occurs in organizations and whether it persists and transfers. It should have implications for organizations to improve their productivity and hence, compete more effectively.

This proposal offers significant new insights into organizational learning and the transfer of knowledge within organizations. Large increases in productivity have been observed as manufacturing units gain experience in production. These learning curves have been observed in many organizations. The proposed research extends the analysis of learning to quality -- a variable that has become increasingly important to a firm's competitiveness. The Principal Investigators (PIs) propose: (1) to evaluate the transfer of learning across shifts in a plant, and (2) to analyze the link between quality and production experience. They plan to investigate the rate at which quality improves with experience, whether quality improvements persist over time, and whether such improvements can be transferred. The proposed research will advance scientific knowledge about learning curves in manufacturing organizations. This information should enable firms to improve their productivity and the quality of their product, and hence to compete more effectively. //

The presence of a learning curve has been documented in many industries. Yet little is known about why learning occurs, whether it persists, and how to transfer it. This award empirically investigates the persistence of learning within organizations and the transfer of learning across organizations. The role of turnover in learning and its persistence are also examined. The analyses are based on records data collected from one firm in the aerospace industry producing an advanced jet and from three plants of the same firm in the automotive industry producing a light truck. The principal investigator will estimate production functions with variables included to assess the importance of persistence, transfer and labor turnover in affecting the efficiency of the production process. In addition to testing whether learning persists, whether it transfers, and whether turnover is related to the rate of learning, the research aims to develop a theoretical model of learning in organizations that integrates and explains the empirical findings. The research will advance scientific knowledge about why learning occurs in organizations and whether it persists and transfers. This information will enable organizations to improve their productivity and hence, compete more effectively. The information will also lead to improved forecasting.

9354995 Fichman Carnegie Mellon University if proposing an innovative GRT program that focuses on the joint impact of groups and technology on organizational effectiveness. As the primary work unit in organizations continues to move from individuals to groups, organizational effectiveness increasingly depends on the effective use of group-oriented organizational designs. At the same time, the expansion of new technologies in organizations both enhances opportunities for the formation and maintenance of work groups and poses new challenges for effective work group functioning. The ability of organizational scientists to contribute the organizational effectiveness in the future will depend on an understanding of groups, technology, and their interaction. We propose a GRT program that is innovative in form. It is a university wide program, operated by faculty in the schools of business, social sciences, and public management. This structure will expose students to a range of theoretical and methological approaches to studying groups and technology in both basic and applied settings. Training will be interdisciplinary in nature. Students will have opportunities to bridge theory and application in newly designed internships and project courses. ***

9319731 Lave Business is under increasing pressure to make each aspect of their activities, products and packaging "environmentally friendly." Unfortunately, no one is clear about what this goal means operationally. We propose research to enhance the ability of corporations to understand recycling, improve their product and process design for the environment, and measure the improvements resulting from our collaboration. Our work consists of six tasks: 1. Improve measures of the environmental consequences of alternative products or designs. Without quantitative measures, goals are vague and management performance cannot be assessed. 2. Estimate and implement our measures for a range of IBM printers. We will collaborate with IBM to meet the corporate goal of increased environmental friendliness through developing and implement our measures and approach. 3. Implement a system that informs the designers at IBM of the environmental implications of alternative designs, materials, choices, and other design issues. We will explore both intrusive and non-intrusive systems. 4. Examine the ways in which the tools can be designed into a company's organizational structure. We seek ways to have companies meet environmental goals routinely and inexpensively without excess time of top executives or decreased produce quality. 5. Investigate organizational learning by examining the extent to which our tools affect product design, particularly as measured by our indices, and how the use of these tools disseminate through the organization and become more valuable to designers over time. We will explore how to increase productivity while enhancing environmental friendliness. 6. Transfer our results and indices to a second company making a quite different product. The Ford Motor Company will work with us in transferring the research results from IBM to quite a different setting.***

Over the past decade knowledge management has become a subject of keen interest among academics and practitioners alike. Book publications on the topic have increased dramatically as managers and executives from a broad spectrum of organizations have recognized the importance of creating, retaining, and transferring knowledge for firm survival and competitive advantage. Academic journals have also published more on knowledge management by scholars from a variety of research traditions. Areas of inquiry span levels of analysis (group, organization, network, population), substantive topics of interest (e.g., technology transfer, innovation and creativity), and intellectual traditions (e.g., organizational behavior and theory, strategic management, economics, psychology, and sociology). As a result, we now have an eclectic mix of findings on knowledge management in organizations.

Because research has tended to accumulate within focused areas of inquiry, there has been relatively little consideration for how developments in one area relate to another. Consequently, important tensions exist between areas of inquiry and opportunities to leverage insights across areas remain unexploited. The study of knowledge management is at a point where future research stands to benefit greatly from surveying existing research in particular areas and from integrating findings across those areas.

To this end, a two-day conference on "Creating, Retaining, and Transferring Knowledge in Organizations" will be organized at Carnegie Mellon University on September 7-9, 2001. The goals of the conference are to: (1) synthesize what is known about managing knowledge in organizations, (2) identify gaps and inconsistencies in our understanding of the management of organizational knowledge, (3) define future research directions on the management of knowledge in organizations, and (4) disseminate research findings about knowledge creation, retention, and transfer.

The conference is being coordinated with a special issue of Management Science. Authors of the most promising manuscripts after the first round of reviews will be invited to present their work at the Carnegie Mellon Conference. The best papers from the conference will be published in the Management Science special issue.

The conference will play a critical role in synthesizing existing knowledge and developing new knowledge about the creation, retention, and transfer of knowledge in organizations. The conference will provide contributors with feedback about their work and thereby improve the quality of research in the area. The interactions at the conference will also facilitate connections among researchers from different areas of inquiry and thereby stimulate future research on knowledge management.

Knowledge transfer in organizations has become increasingly important because firms are more often organized in a distributed fashion to take advantage of differences in expertise, labor costs, and access to markets that exist around the world. The increased use of joint ventures and strategic alliances, the increased frequency of mergers and acquisitions, and the greater prevalence of the multiunit organizational form also point to the importance of knowledge transfer. Evidence indicates that organizations that are adept at transferring knowledge across their units are more productive and more likely to survive than their counterparts that are less effective at knowledge transfer. The research examines a critical predictor of knowledge transfer across groups: whether the groups share a social identity. We hypothesize that sharing a social identity affects the likelihood of knowledge transfer across groups and their subsequent performance. Group members who share a social identity generally view their own group, its members, its products, and its processes more positively than those of other groups. In a laboratory study, we found that groups that shared a superordinate social identity with a new member who rotated in from another group were very likely to adopt innovations proposed by the rotating member when the innovations improved their performance and to reject innovations when they did not improve performance. By contrast, groups that did not share a superordinate social identity with a rotating member were likely to reject the new member's innovations, even when they would have improved group performance. The current research replicates and builds on our initial results to gain a greater understanding of the processes through which and the conditions under which social identity affects knowledge transfer and performance. The first study aims to determine the minimal conditions necessary to create the perception of a shared superordinate social identity among interacting group members and to affect knowledge transfer. The second and third studies aim to assess how characteristics of groups and characteristics of the knowledge being transferred interact with social identity to affect knowledge transfer. This research has implications for theories of knowledge transfer as well as theories about shared social identity. Because knowledge transfer can have a significant impact on group and organizational performance, the research has practical implications for improving organizational and work group effectiveness.

This research explores the effects of offshoring on the creation, retention and transfer of knowledge in organizations. Offshoring, or the act of transferring some of a firm's recurring activities to outside providers, has increased significantly in recent years. Although cost savings are often the primary driver for offshoring, the impact of offshoring on productivity gains and knowledge transfer over the long term remains unclear.

The researchers will examine the effects of offshoring on organizational learning and knowledge transfer. A method that generalizes a well-established learning-curve framework so that it captures the effects of offshoring on organizational learning and knowledge transfer has been proposed. The method will be fully specified as part of the research project. Its validity and usefulness will be tested through a prototype study at a global financial services firm that is transferring work done in one of its U.S. facilities to employees in a lower wage country. Data will be collected before, during and after the offshoring activity; effects on learning rates and knowledge transfer will be estimated. Not only will the work advance research about organizational learning, it will also provide information that can enable organizations to make better decisions about offshoring, decisions that take into account firm competitiveness and member well-being, not just cost savings.

As team members gain experience working together, team performance improves significantly. These "learning curves" have been observed in many team settings, including software development teams, hospital surgery teams and coal-mining crews. This research project will examine constituents of team experience in order to learn more about the specific phenomena that underlie learning curve gains.

Researchers have attributed some of the performance gains associated with team longevity to the development of "transactive memory" (TM) systems, which involve awareness of who knows and does what on a team. When a team has a well-defined TMS, team members know whom to rely on for specific skills or expertise. A series of laboratory studies will manipulate the match between team members' knowledge and roles and the extent to which team members share a common language. The experiments will examine the separate and interactive effects of these variables on team performance as well as the nature of the task (e.g., its uncertainty, urgency), characteristics of team members (e.g., member diversity), and features of the work context (e.g., whether team performance occurs in a virtual or co-located setting) in order to identify which component of transactive memory (or which interactions) increases team performance.

This research has theoretical and practical implications. Due to the rapid organizational and technological changes prevalent in today's workplace, teams often do not not have the luxury of staying together for extended periods. By unpacking the constituents of learning curve effects we learn how to promote these effects more quickly. Conversely, we can learn to recognize the conditions in which there can be no substitute for time.

Learning Across Product, Workgroup, and Geographic Boundaries

Organizational learning is critical to the performance and long-run success of firms and nations. Organi-zations that are able to learn from their experience and transfer the knowledge they acquire throughout their establishments are more successful than their counterparts that are less adept at organizational learning. Yet organizations vary significantly in their ability to learn with some organizations demonstrat-ing dramatic improvements and other organizations evidencing little or no learning. Leveraging extensive data collected over several years from a high technology, offshore product development and manufacturing facility of a U.S. firm, this project conducts three studies to shed light into learning across 1) product, 2) workgroup, and 3) geographic boundaries within the firm.

Intellectual Merit: The first study focuses on organizational learning in a multi-product production envi-ronment with high turnover. Ninety percent of U.S. output comes from multi-product facilities. Yet past studies of organizational learning have focused primarily on production sites with a single product or a product with minor variations. This first study investigates how product mix and employee turnover affect performance, whether turnover is more harmful for certain products and processes than others, and whether turnover of individuals with certain skills and experiences is more harmful than turnover of other individuals. The second study examines knowledge transfer across workgroups. The third study sheds insights into whether moving product development closer to manufacturing helps performance, which product development activities may be important to co-locate, and the impact on performance of moving more product development activities offshore. As more manufacturing has moved overseas, there have been concerns that knowledge work, such as R&D, will follow.

Broader Impact: These three studies provide empirical evidence about knowledge accumulation and transfer in an offshore environment, and thereby inform corporate decisions about offshoring as well as U.S. industrial and manufacturing policy.

In the face of the vast scale of software-intensive systems needed today, modern development environments fail dramatically, typically leading to information overload, an inability to deal with the highly dynamic nature of both the systems and the organizations that develop them, and failure to support collaboration across organizational boundaries. The overarching aim of this project is to provide a scientific foundation for human-centered environments that make large-scale and distributed project awareness, communication, and coordination as effortless as in a small team. It accomplishes this by (a) performing empirical studies of real-world large-scale high-complexity software projects to understand how task coordination occurs in and contributes to organizational context, (b) developing an underlying theory of coordination in context, which will motivate and guide (c) the design of new coordination technology that explicitly addresses information overload, dynamism, and organizational boundaries.

Intellectual merit: The research will result in four contributions: (a) a sound theoretical basis that captures how task coordination and organizational context interplay at scale; (b) theory-driven empirical studies of in-context coordination; (c) knowledge about how to achieve improvements in productivity, quality, and development speed; and (d) a suite of design principles, tool prototypes, and interaction techniques for collaboration at a very large scale. These outcomes will transform the landscape of coordination technology by squarely addressing the issue of scale, moving from coordination within a team to coordination across many developers, across many teams, and across multiple geographical and organizational boundaries.

Broader Impacts: As society enters the era of "ultra large scale" software-intensive systems, coordination at such scales is a major unsolved problem, persistently hampering development and advances in vital domains such as healthcare, security, defense, eGovernment, and energy. The outcomes of this project will not only provide major economic benefits, but also major societal benefits in the form of the new systems that now can be developed. Through close collaboration with industry partners, the results will quickly find their way into practice. The project will also increase involvement of women in computer science through workshops and mentoring activities.

Firms innovate through the combination of new and existing knowledge. Often some of the knowledge required to innovate comes from outside the boundaries of the firm. Hiring scientists and engineers with the right experience is a powerful mechanism for transferring knowledge into the firm. Not only can the movement of scientists and engineers between firms affect innovation within firms, it can also affect the aggregate development of high-technology industries. Yet, we know relatively little about this channel of knowledge communication. What type of employee prior experience aids a firm in successfully pursuing new technological areas? What are the social and structural factors within an organization that facilitate employees? transferring knowledge developed during their prior experiences? And ultimately, what are the implications of this knowledge transfer for firm innovation and industry evolution?

This project addresses three important questions. First, using archival data it documents the aggregate impact of employee mobility on firms and industries and the implications of employee mobility for innovation and innovation policy. Second, complementing the archival analyses, the project uses interviews with scientists and engineers working on laser technology and provides a detailed analysis of how employees transfer knowledge from their prior experiences and what facilitates this process. Third, the project uses an experimental approach to examine the causal mechanisms through which personnel mobility enables knowledge transfer and innovation. This multi-method approach combining a field study, which has high external validity, with a laboratory study that has high internal validity provides insights into challenging, yet important, questions on knowledge transfer by personnel mobility.

Broader Impacts:
This research increases understanding of employee mobility?s role in innovation in firms. For instance, the movement of scientists and engineers from firms currently in a high-technology market to firms not yet in the market can lower the barrier for these firms to enter. These firms can benefit from vital knowledge individuals bring with them on market logistics or norms or ideas on new product variants that the prior employer did not pursue. From this understanding, there are implications about the conditions under which the employment mobility of scientists and engineers ought to be supported, by, for example, fostering policies that allow individuals to more easily move from job to job (such as non-employer tied health insurance or limiting employee non-compete contracts) or encouraging organizational structures that facilitate knowledge transfer by individuals.

Teams are increasingly used in a variety of organizational contexts, including education, health care, government and for-profit firms. Information about how to increase their effectiveness promises to improve the performance and competitiveness of organizations in the U.S. and the well being of their members. Our proposed research has implications not only for teams in traditional work settings but also in new emerging settings such as distributed work teams and online communities. We identify the patterns of communication that lead to the strongest transactive memory and the highest team performance. Thus, the research will result in information that team members and leaders can use to improve their team's performance. In addition, the development of a behavioral measure of TMS would enable researchers to analyze TMS in large teams and geographically distributed contexts, which are becoming increasingly prevalent in organizations and online communities around the world. All together, the results have the potential to advance our understanding of team collaboration, team formation, communication networks and team performance.

The research examines the effects of communication networks on transactive memory system development and team performance. A transactive memory system (TMS) is a collective system for encoding, storing and retrieving information. Teams with well-developed TMSs have been found to perform better across a variety of tasks compared to teams lacking TMSs. Known as systems of "who knows what," a TMS emerges through communications and interactions among team members as they learn and rely on each other's skills and knowledge. Although a TMS hinges on communication and interaction, very little research has been conducted on how communication networks affect a group's TMS. Communication networks constrain or enable communication within a team and thus potentially alter the development of TMS. Our research investigates the characteristics of communication networks that enhance the development of TMS in a series of studies incorporating complementary laboratory and archival methods. First, we manipulate the communication networks that exist within teams in an experiment to examine the effects of network characteristics on the team's TMS and performance. We investigate two dimensions of team performance: the number of errors and creativity. Second, because in many contexts individuals choose their own networks and/or their positions within the network, we compare the effects of networks and position assignments that are imposed by the experimenter to those that are chosen by participants. This enables us to determine if effects observed are due to the communication network itself or due to participants' enactment of the network. By manipulating the networks and using random assignment to networks and to positions within the networks, we are able to make causal statements about the effects of network characteristics on TMS development and team performance. Third, using data from our experiments, we will develop and refine a new unobtrusive, behavioral measure of TMS. This measure will be applied to data from real teams who use online networks for large-scale technology-mediated projects. Following the validation of this new TMS measure, we will examine how it relates to performance for large online teams.