Communication professor Janet Fulk (pictured, above), along with USC Ph.D. alumnus professor Yu Connie Yuan of Cornell University, recently received a grant of $568,754 from the National Science Foundation for her project “Retaining organizational knowledge in connective and communal transactive memory systems: A cross-culture investigation from a multilevel, network perspective.” Communication professors Peter Monge and Dmitri Williams also received a grant from the NSF.
More than at any other time in human history, advances in the 21st century will be based on systems and networks of human knowledge, Fulk said. Effective knowledge retention and sharing systems are crucial to for-profit firms seeking competitive advantage, but also to law enforcement and criminal prosecution, hospital processes and patient safety, emergency crews and first responders to crises and disasters, governmental and intergovernmental organizations, and virtually every possible type of organization in every part of the globe.
Fulk's project investigates how groups and organizations can effectively retain and share organizational knowledge via the development of transactive memory (TM), a knowledge retention system that is made up of a network of individual memory systems, both human and technological. The research makes three original contributions.
- First, they bridge the artificial divide between organizational behavior and information systems in examining organizational knowledge management by investigating the complex, simultaneous interplay between two major types of knowledge sharing systems: one-to-one connective TM systems supported by social relations (the human system) and one-to-many communal TM systems supported by information technologies (the technological system).
- Second, moving beyond the predominant focus on the cognitive aspect of group knowledge management, the research examines how human affect influences the development and functioning of TM systems at multiple levels: between individuals, among groups and throughout networks of individuals and groups.
- Third, the research investigates the development and usage of connective and communal TM systems in different national cultures. It examines knowledge acquisition, distribution, and pro
cessing in several contexts (a) homogeneous Chinese culture teams in high tech industries in China, an increasingly important but understudied context in the globalizing world, and (b) heterogeneous student teams including individuals from several different cultural backgrounds operating in the United States.
"The results of this research will enable teams, their managers, their organizations, and their networks of partners to better manage crucial knowledge resources," she said. "The results also can serve as a basis for educating the future workforce of engineers and managers to better prepare them in securing the advantages and avoiding the pitfalls of cultural differences in a globalizing economy. The project will span a period of three years. Survey and interview data will be analyzed using multivariate statistical techniques."
Monge (pictured, above right) and a team of three others from Northwestern University have received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study the socio-technical dynamics shaping the assembly of teams in virtual communities. With the advent of cyber infrastructure, the assembly of teams is both enabled and constrained by the multidimensional networks in which members are embedded. These multidimensional networks include a variety of links that exist not only among individuals, but also with documents, datasets, workflows, analytic tools, and concepts.
With these new configurations in mind, this project addresses two main research questions: First, what are the socio-technical motivations that explain the assembly of teams in virtual communities? Second, to what extent do the assembly mechanisms of teams influence their effectiveness? The research team will study six unique organizations serving diverse scientific virtual communities. T
Williams (pictured, left) recently received a $176,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to research the dynamics of group behavior in virtual worlds (read more here).
