Research On The Influence Of Knowledge Diversity On Knowledge Sharing And Innovation Performance In R&D Team

With the increasing popularity of team work,the competition of the organization has changed from the game of attracting highly creative individuals to the battle of building highly innovative teams.More and more enterprises hope to bring in new ideas and thoughts by recruiting diverse talents with different knowledge,skills and experience,so as to improve team's innovation performance.Knowledge diversity is a aggregation feature of the team,which refers to the differentiation degree of the team in terms of knowledge,skills,ideas and information.Compared with the superficial diversity such as age diversity or gender diversity,knowledge diversity is the deep side of the team.The higher the level of knowledge diversity,the more abundant the knowledge,skills and experience the team has,and the more effective it is for the team to solve complex innovation matters.Moreover,team member's knowledge largely represents his/her cognitive schema,so the knowledge diversity represents the diverse methods to solve the same problems,and teams with diverse knowledge have wider perspectives and different ideas,which is helpful to produce more creative results.However,knowledge diversity only lays possibility of team innovation.It does not directly determine the final team performance.The prerequisite for diversity to play a positive role is that heterogeneous knowledge can be effectively integrated and utilized,and information exchange and processing can be sufficient and appropriate.Therefore,knowledge sharing process is the key link connecting knowledge diversity and team innovation performance.Besides,the relationship is also affected by the internal and external surroundings of the team,so introducing reasonable situational factors into the study helps to explain the relationship better.Therefore,based on systematic literature review,this paper choose the R&D team as research object and construct a regulated intermediary model.First,clarify the impact of knowledge diversity on team innovation performance,which further improves previous research work;Secondly,the knowledge sharing is introduced into this paper so as to prove its intermediary influence.Thirdly,explore the role of task characteristics and team atmosphere in regulating the process.The empirical test of 352 R&D team members shows that knowledge diversity significantly promotes knowledge sharing and innovation performance.Knowledge sharing partly mediates knowledge diversity and team innovation performance.Besides,task interdependence,team trust climate,team identity climate and team openness climate all positively regulate the relationship between knowledge diversity and knowledge sharing significantly.