Expertise dissimilarity and creativity : can sharing tacit and explicit knowledge enhance creativity?

Abstract

This paper investigated whether knowledge sharing may moderate the effect of functional specialization dissimilarity on individual creative behaviors in project teams. Functional specialization dissimilarity is defined here as the extent to which a member is different from, or dissimilar to, other members in terms of the functional departments they belong to and their professional responsibilities. Multilevel analyses on data collected from 200 members of 40 project teams in three research institutes of telecommunication company revealed that members who are functionally dissimilar to others are more creative when the team has higher levels of tacit knowledge sharing rather than explicit knowledge sharing. By contrast, members who are functionally similar to others are more creative when the team has higher levels of explicit knowledge sharing rather than tacit knowledge sharing.