An Empirical Study On Factors Of Knowledge Sharing In Cross-disciplinary Teams

With the popularity of the concept of Knowledge Management, more and more enterprises have realized the importance of knowledge, which has already become enterprises'economic resources and the source of competitive advantages. In the age of knowledge economy, intensified competition and complex work that faced by enterprises make the team working style a favor for them. In fact, the team working form is not new at all, and its performance depends on the knowledge sharing among team members to some extent. Therefore, how to create high-performance teams and to share knowledge within the teams become a broad concern of both entrepreneurs and scholars.Knowledge Sharing has been recently proved to be vital to as well as a difficulty of the successful Knowledge Management. However, it is affected by multiple different factors in light of space differentiation. These factors play different roles in the process of Knowledge Sharing. The great flexibilities in forms, functions and operations of Cross-disciplinary teams provide favorable conditions for sharing knowledge. The knowledge sharing effects are different according to different environmental and personal factors. Currently, the researches on knowledge sharing factors in cross-disciplinary teams are really rare, and this thesis gives a conceptual model and seven main hypotheses to further study this issue. Both statistical and case study methods are applied in the thesis.The thesis is aimed to explore how each factor influence on the knowledge sharing process in cross-disciplinary teams, trying to provide enterprises some useful ideas in efficient team management and comprehensive knowledge management. The innovation of this paper mainly exists in three aspects as following. Firstly, it integrates the researches on of both cross-disciplinary teams and knowledge sharing. Secondly, the qualitative and quantitative methods are effectively combined in the paper, and the results of the study show that atmosphere, connections and personal abilities are the most important factors in knowledge sharing of cross-disciplinary teams. Thirdly, it gives a try to explain the complex correlations among the factors.In the thesis, chapter 1 gives a short introduction of the researching background and significances. Chapter 2 reviews the domestic and foreign theories and literature relating to this study. On the basis of reviewing related models, Chapter 3 puts forward the theoretical model and hypotheses and scales Chapter 4 surveys people who have experienced the cross-disciplinary teamwork by interviewing and questionnaire, and the data are analyzed by SPSS 16.0. Chapter 5 is the conclusion of the study, which suggests enterprises put more emphasis on these factors, such as team atmosphere, connections and personal abilities.