The Mechanisms Of Knowledge Leadership On Knowledge Withholding Behavior In Cross-functional Project Teams

Knowledge sharing among team members is critical to project performance within the cross-functional project team(CFPT).However,knowledge boundary barriers and competitive interaction among team members with diverse knowledge are particularly true in cross-functional context,inducing the emergence of knowledge withholding behavior(KWB).Therefore,this research focuses on addressing the burning problem about how project managers prosocially intervene in alleviating team members' KWB and its negative outcomes.For that,this research takes the evolution process of KWB as the cut-in point,aiming to investigate the integrated prosocial-dominated mechanisms of knowledge leadership on alleviating the intention,the emergence and negative outcomes of KWB.The main contents are as follows.Firstly,this study examines how knowledge leadership alleviates knowledge withholding intention of team members through dual prosocial sensemaking mechanisms,namely,perceived team goal commitment and knowledge-orientation prosocial impact.Theoretical hypotheses proposed were empirically tested by establishing structural equation model adopted to analyze quantitative data from two-wave questionnaire survey.Results suggest that knowledge leadership and knowledge-oriented prosocial impact have significantly negative effects on knowledge withholding intention whereas team goal commitment has no significant effect on such intention.Nevertheless,the interaction of team goal commitment and knowledge-orientation prosocial impact has a negative effect on knowledge withholding intention.Furthermore,knowledge leadership has an indirect effect on knowledge withholding intention via knowledge-oriented prosocial impact.Then this dissertation investigates the cross-level influences of knowledge leadership on KWB of team members via team mastery-dominated motivational climate and motivation regulation mechanisms of individual KWB.Such motivation regulation mechanisms incorporate two aspects,perceived promotion of others' knowledge value and perceived promotion of knowledge power,and their operationalizations were well-designed.Then theoretical hypotheses proposed were empirically tested by using hierarchical linear modeling which process hierarchical quantitative data collected from two-wave questionnaire survey.Test results suggest that knowledge leadership has positive effects on team mastery-dominated motivational climate,perceived promotion of knowledge power,and perceived promotion of others' knowledge value.Moreover,perceived promotion of knowledge power has negative effect on KWB whereas perceived promotion of others' knowledge value has no significant effect.But the interaction of them has negative effect on KWB.Furthermore,team mastery-dominated motivational climate influences KWB only through perceived promotion of knowledge power.To effectively weaken the negative impact of knowledge withholding behavior on team cooperation process and project performance,this study takes a further step to explore how knowledge leadership as a contingent factor moderates the relationships among team knowledge withholding,transactive memory system,and CFPT performance.The results about testing hypotheses by a questionnaire survey show that transactive memory system completely mediates the negative effect of team knowledge withholding on CFPT performance.Moreover,knowledge leadership negatively moderates the relationship between team knowledge withholding and CFPT performance through promoting the development and functioning of transactive memory system.Finally,this research follows a qualitative research strategy to comprehensively explain and confirm the effectiveness of prosocially intervening process mechanisms of knowledge leadership during the evolutionary process of KWB in the context of CFPTs.The qualitative data was collected in main ways of semi-structured interviews and text material from a critical case.The results confirmed the effectiveness of prosocial sensemaking mechanism,cross-level motivational controlled mechanisms,and knowledge coordination mechanism in mitigating KWB.More importantly,such effectiveness attributes to the perception of knowledge-dominated interests and the regulation and visualization of job content.Then there forms a framework regarding prosocially intervening process mechanisms of knowledge leadership on KWB.The main innovation of this dissertation incorporates four aspects.(1)It explores the prosocially sensemaking process concerning on weakening knowledge withholding intention within CFPTs,from the perspective of knowledge leadership.This enriches the research on antecedents of knowledge withholding intention and provides a new theoretical perspective and research context for deepening the understanding of how to alleviate knowledge withholding intention.(2)It integrates the roles of team mastery-dominated motivational climate and dual regulating power of KWB motivation at the individual level to explore the cross-level process mechanisms of knowledge leadership on controlling the motivation of KWB.By doing so,it addresses the limitation of the previous research that only focuses on the motivation controlled mechanism of knowledge withholding at a single level.It also offers clear guidance on how knowledge leadership comprehensively deploys negative knowledge behavior management strategy at both the team level and the individual level;(3)Investigating the weakening mechanism of negative effects of team knowledge withholding makes up for the deficiency of previous research that focus on the individual or situational boundary conditions but ignore the team contingency of knowledge leadership.All of these contribute to not only expanding the research on the consequences of team knowledge withholding but also providing practical guidance for weakening the negative effects of team knowledge hiding on teamwork and project performance;(4)This research builds a model of the prosocially intervening mechanism concerning on KWB in the context of CFPTs,greatly integrating the multi-layered and multi-dimensional trickle-down process mechanisms through which knowledge leadership influences KWB.