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MANAGING KNOWLEDGE CREATION IN TEAMS 81

of the group – the ‘knowledge and knowing capability of a social collectivity’
(Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998, p. 245). Intellectual capital, and its mix across
the team, is important. Moreover, it is also important that those involved in the
team are aware of, and understand and respect, the knowledge and skills of the
others who are involved, since it is pointless having a team member involved
who has expertise which is important but never used. This has been referred
to as team cognition (He et al., 2007): ‘the mental models collectively held
by a group of individuals that enable them to accomplish tasks by acting as a
coordinated unit’.
It is unlikely, however, that those involved in a team will have all the rel-
evant knowledge and expertise necessary, whether to design a new system, or
develop a new product or service per se or to ensure that it is accepted and
implemented by all those for whom it is intended. Rather, team members will
need to network with a range of other individuals in order to appropriate the
necessary knowledge as well as communicate convincingly to all those who
will be impacted. This wider group of people who will be involved in the
innovation process can call the stakeholders. For example, if a project team
has been brought together to find ways to reduce an organization’s carbon
footprint, they will need to find out how energy resources are currently being
used, think creatively about ways to reduce this energy use, and then con-
vince people to actually implement the suggested solutions – even if some
of the solutions are actually very simple, say switching off laptops and PCs
rather than leaving them on all night. If the project team tries to work on
the project in isolation they are likely to not only ignore relevant and impor-
tant information but also to have any solutions identified not implemented
because those that need to change their practices have not been involved in
the thought processes that lead to the new solutions and so are unlikely to
understand or buy-into the suggested changes. Thus the project team needs
to engage with a range of stakeholders. In doing this they will be drawing
upon their collective social capital. Nahapiet and Ghoshal define social capital
as ‘the sum of actual and potential resources within, available through, and
derived from the network of relationships possessed by an individual or social
unit’ (1998, p. 243).
Nahapiet and Ghoshal identify three types of social capital – structural, cognitive
and relational. Structural social capital refers to the actual network ties between
individuals, through which knowledge is potentially shared. We look at this aspect
of social capital more fully in Chapter 8 when we examine communities of practice.
Cognitive social capital refers to the overlap in frames of reference and understanding
that allows connected individuals to share knowledge – just because there is a network
connection does not necessarily mean that people will be able to share knowledge
effectively since without some shared understanding communication will be difficult.
We explore this below in relation to different types of knowledge boundaries that can
exist between individuals, especially when they come from different backgrounds.
Finally, relational social capital refers to whether or not those with a connection
trust each other – so, again, there may be a connection but if there is a lack of trust

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