Subjective interdependencies in knowledge integration

The main challenge to integrating the knowledge of diverse teams lies in clarifying the connections between their members’ individual knowledge. Existing research suggests that teams can overcome it by making knowledge-dependence clear, such that seemingly incompatible knowledge is transformed into a useable form. However, evaluating relevance is often subjective, and little is known about how teams decide which knowledge is relevant. The purpose of this paper is therefore to address this absence by developing a model of knowledge integration that takes subjectivity into account. This model holds that planned dependencies and boundary-related cues both shape subjective dependencies, and provides possible explanations for prior findings that effective knowledge integration is not a sufficient condition for making knowledge explicit. It also sheds some light on the reasons that teams sometimes manage knowledge effectively and sometimes fail to do so.