The effects of knowledge management systems on emergent teams: towards a research model

This article describes how knowledge management systems can enhance the effectiveness of teams that analyze complex, non-recurring problems by improving the way that team composition evolves. Knowledge management systems reduce the costs of searching for specialized knowledge resources, making it more likely that teams will incorporate a diversity of knowledge. Drawing on the concept of requisite variety, this article argues that increases in team knowledge variety lead to improvements in the effectiveness of the solutions generated by a team, which in turn enhance their organization's adaptive ability. This process also reinforces the existing distribution of knowledge within the organization, increasing employee specialization. The author develops a series of propositions and combines them into a research model from which he draws implications for researchers and managers. 2 People who ran those factories in the brute-force economy of the past liked large numbers of predictable, interchangeable, don't-ask-why workers for their assembly lines.… Third Wave economies, by contrast, will require (and tend to reward) a radically different kind of worker — one who thinks, questions, innovates, and takes entrepreneurial risk. Workers who are not easily interchangeable. Put differently, it will favor individuality. INTRODUCTION Knowledge management systems (KMS) have been the subject of considerable interest by academics and practitioners over the past decade, yet little cumulative empirical research has been conducted to establish the causal mechanisms by which KMS can influence organizational performance. This article develops a series of testable propositions to describe the connection between KMS use and the quality of solutions produced by "emergent" teams (characterized by an ongoing evolution in team composition that does not follow a predefined pattern). In addition, it proposes that ongoing KMS use increases employee specialization, which in turn reinforces KMS use. By putting forward a researchable model of the effects of KMS use on organizational adaptation and employee specialization, this article calls attention to a set of testable intermediate effects that may help advance research in this emerging field.