Research On The Relation Between Knowledge Heterogeneity And Team Performance Based On Knowledge Sharing

Knowledge has become a kind of significant resource that could help enterprisesreceive the pivotal competitive strength as the knowledge economic era comes andmore and more enterprises tend to change into knowledge organizations. There is hugecompetition among enterprises which have to face more and more complex inside andoutside environment, an individual’s knowledge could not satisfy today’s workdemand in such enterprises, so it is necessary for organization members tocommunicate with others, when working in a team provide some feasibility to thisexchange. Nowadays, lots of enterprises have established some teams to start work, forteam performance is rest with knowledge sharing among team members in a certainextent, how to integrate every member’s knowledge to promote knowledge sharing hasbecome a common issue for scholars and enterprisers.This paper mainly researched team’ run mechanism in knowledge management,we started from team members’ knowledge diversity and analyzed such diversity’seffect on team performance, knowledge sharing, as a kind of team process, was drawninto the research mechanism and we tried to explore its mediate function in order tocomplete and understand the whole effect mechanism better, furthermore, it could helpmanagers draw up team structure better. Firstly, we consulted a number of internal andexternal literatures about this subject to understand the meanings of knowledgeheterogeneity, knowledge sharing and team performance and the relationship amongthe three variables, on the other hand, some research limitations were discovered.Secondly, we established measuring scales for these three variables and did aquestionnaire survey beforehand, then we did some amendment to make sure that ourquestionnaire had enough efficiency and effectiveness. At last, we did a lot ofquestionnaire survey and deal with the data received to prove the relationship amongthe three variables. Result showed that knowledge heterogeneity could be classifiedinto three kinds roughly, speciality heterogeneity, education heterogeneity and workexperience heterogeneity, speciality heterogeneity was positively related to knowledge sharing and team performance, while education heterogeneity was negative related toknowledge sharing and team performance, work experience heterogeneity waspositively related to knowledge sharing and team performance, but the effect was notsignificant. In addition, we discovered team knowledge sharing played a partialmediate function between team knowledge heterogeneity and team performance.There were two main innovation points in the paper: on one hand, we took thewhole team as the research target to study the effect of knowledge diversity andknowledge sharing, rather than just pay attention to individual level, on the other hand,we have thought about the heterogeneity interactive structure which was made up byknowledge diversity and other diversities (age and position). This paper’s limitationsmight be that our range of questionnaire survey was too narrow; the quality ofmeasuring scales was not very high; we didn’t do demonstration based on theclassification of industry and members who were investigated were subjective infinishing the questionnaire. Future research could be expanded in three directions:firstly, we can consider with the classification of industry to understand therelationship among knowledge heterogeneity, knowledge sharing and teamperformance better; secondly, we may add some outsider visual angles such as externalknowledge network of a team, which must could affect knowledge sharing and teamperformance; Thirdly, knowledge conflict, as another team process which might appearwhen knowledge sharing occurs, is still worth to study further.