The biggest problem is a people problem: if people from different sites don't have the respect and trust for each other, they don't work well together.
The coordination of effort within and among different expert groups is a central feature of contemporary organizations. Within the existing literature, however, a dichotomy has emerged in our understanding
One of the key challenges that organizations face when trying to integrate knowledge across different functions is the need to overcome knowledge boundaries between team members. In cross-functional teams, these boundaries, associated with different knowledge backgrounds of people from various disciplines, create communication problems, necessitating team members to engage in complex cognitive processes when integrating knowledge toward a joint outcome. This research investigates the impact of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic knowledge boundaries on a team's ability to develop a transactive memory system (TMS)-a collective memory system for knowledge coordination in groups. Results from our survey show that syntactic and pragmatic knowledge boundaries negatively affect TMS development. These findings extend TMS theory beyond the information-processing view, which treats knowledge as an object that can be stored and retrieved, to the interpretive and practicebased views of knowledge, which recognize that knowledge (in particular specialized knowledge) is localized, situated, and embedded in practice.
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