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PROJECT-BASED ORGANIZATIONS AND KNOWLEDGE WORK 107

• Interdependence – all members have to contribute towards the task in some way
• Personal interaction – members communicate and share information with each
other
• Mutual infl uence – each member infl uences every other member.

These features of teams are important in order to encourage effective knowl-
edge sharing and so facilitate knowledge creation. However, these features of a
team are often not present in the context of projects and it is projects that are
typically used by organizations to create new products and services or to effect
organizational change. Thus, even though we might talk about project teams
the reality is that a project in an organizational context often does not have a
fixed membership and the work undertaken in a project is often very tempo-
rary, fluid, interrupted and distributed. For example, innovation projects often
involve a range of individuals (and organizations) who enter and leave the proj-
ect at different points in time, depending on particular issues that arise, so that
project members often work on several projects at once and may not identify
themselves with the success of a particular project. As such, individuals involved
may not necessarily see themselves as part of a (psychological) team and group
goals, mutual interests and common understanding may be difficult to develop
because there is no shared practice that unites project team members. Moreover,
the tight deadlines that are often imposed on projects can mean that creativity
is curtailed at the expense of expediency. Projects may, thus, operate to a ‘logic
of consequentiality’ (i.e. which actions will produce the quickest acceptable out-
comes) rather than a ‘logic of appropriateness’ (i.e. which actions will produce
the optimal outcomes in the long term – March and Olsen, 1995). Lindkvist
(2005), thus, suggests that ‘collectivity’ – that is a constellation of groups and
individuals who temporarily share insights in order to achieve particular objec-
tives – can sometimes be a better descriptor of project work than is ‘commu-
nity’, which brings with it connotations of shared understandings and identity
constructed and negotiated over time, as per a psychological team. This lack of
a sense of ‘community’ (that is encouraged by shared practice) in project work
can impede the development of trust that we saw in the previous chapter is so
crucial for knowledge sharing.
Despite this caveat, projects can stimulate knowledge creation and be fertile
sites for learning, precisely because they bring together individuals from different
backgrounds to work collectively to achieve some kind of common objective, with
the objective typically having something to do with creating something new –
something that would not neatly fit within the mainstream organization, where
routines are established to take care of day-to-day business. In achieving this
learning, teams will need to overcome the various kinds of knowledge boundaries
considered in the previous chapter and actually develop some level of community
around a shared practice, at least if they are going to create knowledge. Ironically,
however, the very ability of projects to develop new shared practices to overcome
the knowledge boundaries created by organizational specialization also limits the
extent to which projects are able to share what has been learnt with the rest of

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