Introduction

Literature review and hypotheses development

Methodology

Results

Discussion

References

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the influences of social capital on knowledge heterogeneity in order to advance the understanding of the effects and to reconcile existing inconsistent findings.
Design/methodology/approach – Survey data collected from 105 new product development (NPD) projects were analyzed with regression-based methods.
Findings – The results indicated that trust, centralization and shared vision as the three social capital dimensions generally have negative impacts on the domain and presentation dimensions of knowledge heterogeneity. However, the three dimensions of social capital do not exhibit consistent influences on the tacitness heterogeneity (i.e. an epistemological dimension of knowledge heterogeneity).
Research limitations/implications – More research is needed to explore the role of social capital dimensions in developing a range of knowledge attributes of NPD teams, among which knowledge heterogeneity is one. The various dimensions of knowledge an NPD team possesses should have performance implications and deserve future investigation.
Originality/value – The study is one of the first documented attempts to demonstrate contingencies in the relationship between social capital and knowledge heterogeneity. The effect of social capital on knowledge heterogeneity should be understood at the level of dimensions of the two respective constructs.

Introduction

Organizations are knowledge-processing entities that operate in competitive business environments. In such contexts, high-quality knowledge management activities, including the creation, acquisition, sharing and integration (Grant, 1996; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995) of knowledge as critical firm-level intellectual capital (Ling, 2013; Su and Carney, 2013), have become crucial for organizational capability building and success (Teece, 1998; Teece et al., 1997). As business environments are rapidly changing and organizations are compelled to change to cope with environmental changes, knowledge is a cornerstone for enacting organizational changes but also a key barrier to changes if not being well managed. Laszlo and Laszlo (2002) argue that knowledge evolution is key for organizational members to align with societal changes with sustainable leaning so as to create competitiveness of organizations. Under such a premise, a detailed clarification of the relationships between specific enablers and specific types of knowledge (henceforth called knowledge dimensions) useful for the development of organizational competitiveness under rapidly changing environments is vital and crucial for organizations (Chalkiti, 2012; Jones and Mahon, 2012). By contrast, failing to continue the course of knowledge development may lead organizations to face great challenges in high-velocity contexts (Mahon and Jones, 2016; Scalzo, 2006).