R&d Project Teams: Control Mechanisms and Knowledge Integration Practices

Purpose The purpose of the paper is to analyse how the organizational control mechanisms adopted within project teams in R&D settings influence the effectiveness of knowledge integration processes. In our research we analysed the functioning of project teams within an organization operating in the industry of turn-key devices for power plants. Our unit of analysis is the project team, a setting where it is possible to identify the presence of knowledge integration practices (Fong, 2004; Huang and Newell, 2003) and the implementation of control mechanisms (Clegg, Courpasson, 2004). The concept of knowledge integration practices refers to the joint exploitation of distributed knowledge in a way which permits the access to, and utilisation of, individuals’ specialised knowledge in undertaking a collective effort (Enberg, 2007). The project team is a highly specialized knowledge setting where people with different competencies work together in order to get to a common goal.