Refereed Publications Abstract

A SOCIAL NETWORK VIEW OF ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING: RELATIONAL AND STRUCTURAL DIMENSIONS OF ‘KNOW WHO’

Research in organizational learning has demonstrated processes and occasionally performance implications of acquisition of declarative (know what) and procedural (know how) knowledge. However, there has been considerably less attention paid to learned characteristics of relationships that affect the decision to seek information from other people. Based on a review of the social network, information processing and organizational learning literatures, along with the results of a previous qualitative study, we propose a formal model of information seeking in which the probability of seeking information from another person is a function of:

Knowing what that person knows
Valuing what that person knows
Being able to gain timely access to that person’s thinking
Perceiving that seeking information from that person would not be too costly

We also hypothesize that the knowing, access and cost variables mediate the relationship between physical proximity and information seeking. The model is tested using two separate research sites to provide replication. The results indicate strong support for the model and the mediation hypothesis (with the exception of the cost variable). Implications are drawn for the study of both transactive memory and organizational learning, as well as for management practice.

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