Too much knowledge sharing?

de Martine Ruth Haas

This paper explores the possibility that knowledge sharing in organizations can undermine performance. Drawing on organization learning and organization capability theories, we hypothesize that task units have varying needs to learn and differentiate themselves from competitors and hence derive different levels of value from obtaining and using knowledge from outside the task unit. Using a data set of 182 sales proposals for client work in a management consulting company, we show that the value of obtaining and using knowledge declined with increasing experience of the sales teams, to the point that highly experienced teams performed poorly by losing the bid if they obtained considerable amounts of knowledge from outside the team. Teams that had a high need to differentiate themselves from the competition also had a lower chance of winning if they obtained and used electronic documents, because of the lack of uniqueness afforded by this type of knowledge. There were, however, situations where teams performed better if they obtained and used knowledge. These results suggest that theories of organization learning and organization capabilities cannot be based on the premise that more learning and knowledge sharing in organizations always is beneficial.