The Mechanism Of Knowledge Heterogeneity And Team Innovation

Innovation has become an important driving force to maintain competitiveadvantage for business in rapidly changing and highly competitive environments.Since innovation lies in core competencies which depends on the knowledge basecompanies own, it can be concluded that innovation is closely related to knowledge.Under the increasingly complex business environment, more and more companies areregarding teams as significant units to complete innovative tasks. So much attentionhas been paid to team innovation to explore whether knowledge team heterogeneity iscritical for team innovation. Existing knowledge heterogeneity and team innovationresearchs mostly focus on internal behavior to elaborate the intermediate mechanism,rather than external activities linked to the huge external knowledge network ofknowledge-heterogeneous team members.Therefore, external knowledge network utilization, which is departed into distalknowledge network utilization and local knowledge network utilization, has beenintroduced as a key variable of heterogeneity and innovation research, based onknowledge management theory and social network theory. These two processes mayfacilitate innovation of knowledge-heterogeneous team in different ways. Yet, despitethis recognition, there is much that is not understood about how knowledge-heterogeneous team decide to activate the local knowledge network or the distal ones.Therefor, research theorized and tested conditions under which knowledge team ispositively related to team innovation, both the mediating effect of Moderating Effect oftask characteristics and the moderating role of task characteristics.Empirical Analysis results using322members on103working teams indicatedthat distal and local knowledge network utilization separately mediate the positivecorrelation between knowledge team heterogeneity and team innovation. Further, taskcharacters moderated the relationship between knowledge team heterogeneity andexternal knowledge network utilization: knowledge team heterogeneity facilitatesdistal knowledge network utilization while impedes local knowledge networkutilization when facing complex tasks; rather, knowledge team heterogeneity hinders distal knowledge network utilization while promotes local knowledge networkutilization when facing simple tasks.