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MANAGING KNOWLEDGE CREATION IN TEAMS 101

became discouraged from holding such gatherings, in part because the conceptual
frameworks they developed during these meetings were heavily criticized by the PIs
at whole team meetings (although the ROs claimed that their work surfaced again
later in PI analyses). The low importance attached to RO contributions was reinforced
at the whole team meetings, in which their involvement was limited to presenting
some previously prepared findings from their local universities. They took little part
in discussion and when they attempted to join in their contributions were generally
disregarded. The low point in their marginalization from these meetings occurred
when the PIs decided to split the whole team meetings into two parallel streams,
holding a separate PI meeting in an adjoining room.
An important tension for the ROs, then, was that the espoused consensual
approach to the research – we are all equal and the contributions from PIs and ROs
are of equal importance – cut across the more hierarchical department structures,
which were particularly apparent at one of the universities. Here the autocratic lead-
ership style of the PI was reinforced by the layout of the building, in which all the
professors, including this PI, were housed separately in a luxurious suite of rooms at
the top of the building, commonly referred to as ‘Prof. Corridor’. This PI preserved
a remoteness from most aspects of the project, not taking part in the research and
minimizing contact with the ROs. At full team meetings, to which he travelled first-
class, he regularly employed a mocking and dismissive approach to the younger
male RO working at his university. He clearly placed his departmental needs above
those of the project, insisting that the project coordinator spend one day a week
working for the department and ‘not just the project’. However, such role expecta-
tions (of a superior, distant and ‘figurehead’ status) were not shared by the PI from
one of the other universities, whose approach was to get considerably more involved
in the project and to work closely with her RO.

>> PHASE 3: OUTCOMES
The emergent solution to the tensions and frustrations that were being experienced
by both the PI and the RO groups within the project was a division of the project
into three fairly autonomous ‘bits’, which therefore reduced the interdependen-
cies between the project team, so that conflict could be more easily avoided.
Essentially the project was run as three separate projects, broken down along dis-
ciplinary lines (which happened to also coincide with the geographical dispersion
of the project team). This move to a federated approach completely undermined
the initial explicit intention to ensure a synthesis across the team; indeed such an
integration of the three disciplinary areas had been a major part of the academic
rationale for the project. However, throughout the life cycle of the project two of
the PIs continued to argue for the need to fulfil this early commitment to an inte-
grated project. They tenaciously opposed the emerging tendency for the project
to develop into three ‘federated’ sub-projects; arguing, for example, that all four
ROs should carry out research fieldwork together. However, in reality the low syn-
thesis across the team emerged very rapidly and quickly became strongly embed-
ded so that a return to a synthesized approach became impossible.

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