Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences - Theses

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Type: Doctorate × Start date: 2005 × End date: 2005 × Subject: management ×

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    Knowledge sharing and team performance: the role of leadership and trust
    LEE, PAULINE ( 2005)
    Previous research on knowledge sharing in teams has identified many factors associated with knowledge sharing such as leadership and trust. However there has been little analysis of the inter-relationships between predictors of knowledge sharing. This thesis examined the role of leadership and trust on fostering knowledge sharing in teams, and its impact on team performance. This thesis also tests whether trust mediates the relation between leadership and knowledge sharing. Data for this study was collected from 34 engineering project teams (n = 27 team leaders, 18 senior managers, 169 team members) from a large automotive organisation. The thesis describes a roles-based approach to team leadership that analyses leadership's relationship with knowledge sharing in two principal roles: Knowledge Builder and Knowledge Sharer. This approach is also used to examine how the performance of team leaders in the two roles influences the performance of their teams on the project. It was found that both the Knowledge Builder and Knowledge Sharer role are highly predictive of knowledge sharing in teams. Leadership performance in the roles discriminated between the highest and lowest performing teams. As expected, the Knowledge Sharer role was more strongly related to knowledge sharing than the Knowledge Builder role. It was found that the two related leadership roles have an indirect effect on knowledge sharing mediated through team trust. This indicates that both the Knowledge Builder and Knowledge Sharer influences team trust, which in turn translates into knowledge sharing. Comparison of two high-knowledge sharing teams and two low-knowledge sharing teams reinforced the findings that leadership and trust are important for team knowledge sharing. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the implications of the results for the scholarly literature on team knowledge sharing and for the management of teams involved in knowledge work.