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MANAGING KNOWLEDGE CREATION IN TEAMS 83

this – different ‘thought worlds’. Differences in knowledge will often tend to
generate a conflict of ideas, but this conflict – that Leonard-Barton (1995)
has termed ‘creative abrasion’ – can positively influence creative thinking. This
positive influence will occur if the individuals involved can sustain a meaning-
ful and synergistic conversation with the others. This depends on more than
simply social skills, which enable team members to ‘get along’ with each other.
It also depends on those involved having cognitive skills which allow them to
appreciate and understand the technical knowledge of others – the team cogni-
tion referred to earlier. Iansiti (1993) refers to this as having T-shaped skills –
depth in a particular discipline but combined with a breadth of understanding
of other disciplines. This cognitive skill allows those involved to go beyond
merely tolerating the ideas of others to interacting meaningfully at a cognitive
level to facilitate ‘creative abrasion’.
In addition, shared mental models among team members allow the team to
construct a shared understanding of their situation. This is dependent on the
team members working closely together over a prolonged period, since with
prolonged interaction individuals can share information over and above that
required for each individual to do their particular job. This has also been referred
to as knowledge redundancy. Knowledge redundancy affects a team’s absorptive
capacity (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990). Absorptive capacity refers to the capabil-
ity to recognize the value of new and external information, absorb it and apply it
productively. Absorptive capacity in relation to the capability of synthesizing the
knowledge of other team members is unlikely unless some knowledge redun-
dancy or a T-shaped skill profile exists.
Team-working is, then, a key mechanism that can provide the enabling con-
text for knowledge creation where mutual understanding of deep tacit knowl-
edge can be achieved based on shared experiences over a prolonged period. Rich
personal interaction is necessary in order for those involved to get sufficient
opportunity for the sharing of tacit knowledge. Given this need for rich personal
interaction a key issue has become how to encourage this when those interacting
never meet each other because they are geographically dispersed. We will discuss
this further in Chapter 7 when we look at codification strategies that can be used
to facilitate knowledge sharing and knowledge creation but to pre-empt, it is
clear that ICTs can facilitate this as long as those involved understand how the
different ICT can be used effectively (Banker et al., 2006; Fuller et al., 2006).
In this chapter we next turn to some of the problems of team-working that make
knowledge sharing and collective knowledge creation problematic.

>> PROBLEMS OF TEAM AND PROJECT WORK
Teams are often presented as the organizational panacea that will tackle all
the problems of organizational life, including, as here, knowledge creation.
Teams, it is claimed, can satisfy both individual needs (e.g. for sociability and
self-actualization) and organizational needs (e.g. for productivity and innova-
tion). However, the literature on team-working, while advocating its potential

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