Page 104 -

MANAGING KNOWLEDGE CREATION IN TEAMS 93

The assumption is that these formal, structured processes will guide the project
work. However, what such formal processes ignore is how plans can never pre-
dict everything that is going to happen in practice, especially when the project
is focusing on creating something new through collaborative knowledge gen-
eration. It is therefore the informal, emergent processes – the improvisation
and muddling through – that are as important for project success as the formal
project management processes, allowing those involved to make-do with the
resources at hand, including knowledge, even when not ideal or not those that
were planned for. These informal, often ad-hoc, processes, depend very signifi-
cantly on the social milieu within which the collaborative work is being under-
taken. Ciborra (1998), for example, talks about the importance of care taking,
hospitality and cultivation in encouraging the type of improvisation often neces-
sary in project contexts to overcome obstacles and challenges.
Dodgson (1993, 1994) also focuses on the social problems of collaboration,
and argues that it is crucial to create and sustain personal relationships between
the team members. He goes on to claim that for the exchange of knowledge and
resources to be effective, a high-trust relationship needs to be developed. Part-
ners need to trust one another to be ‘honest, capable and committed to joint
aims’ (p. 291). In a similar way, Von Krogh et al. (2000) argue that an effective
enabling context, allowing for a network of interactions, must be characterized
by care and trust among the participants, if it is going to encourage knowl-
edge sharing and knowledge creation. These authors delineate five aspects of an
enabling context for knowledge creation – mutual trust, active empathy, access
to help, leniency in judgement and courage. Trust has also been shown to be
important in relation to knowledge transfer between organizations (Faems et al.,
2007). The aspect of trust, therefore, seems to be central to understanding team
knowledge sharing and knowledge creation. We need therefore to look at what
is meant by trust and consider how trust can be developed and sustained.

>> THE IMPORTANCE OF TRUST IN COLLABORATIVE
WORK

It is argued, then, that trust can lead to, and is a necessary condition or enabler
for, cooperative behaviour among individuals, groups or organizations. High
levels of trust are considered necessary in order to facilitate the type of com-
munication and dialogue that is needed for people to share tacit knowledge and
generate learning that can lead to knowledge creation. In many articles on the
management of knowledge work the importance of trust for knowledge shar-
ing and knowledge creation is indeed recognized. In such a context, knowledge
can be created spontaneously, as conceptual insight and practice are merged in
action. However, in most cases there is little more than a simple statement that
‘trust is necessary’. In this section we consider the issue of trust in more detail
and illustrate that while trust is indeed important for knowledge creation, it is
also difficult to establish – individuals will not necessarily ‘grow to trust each

6/5/09 7:00:26 AM
9780230_522015_05_cha04.indd 93 6/5/09 7:00:26 AM
9780230_522015_05_cha04.indd 93