Refereed Publications Abstract

THE SOCIAL SIDE OF HIGH PERFORMANCE

Over the past decade we have moved further into an economy where knowledge creation and sharing is central to strategic and operational success. Early knowledge management efforts focused on implementation of technologies to capture and share best practices and work products. More recently attention has shifted to organizational and cultural means of promoting knowledge creation and sharing. Yet while knowledge worker productivity is critical, we know little about how high performers find information and solve problems in their work. This study was undertaken to determine how high performing knowledge workers leverage their informational environments.

First we conducted surveys in four organizations to assess the relationship between high performance and knowledge worker expertise, technology use and personal networks. We found that lack of expertise or technology use predicted poor performance but not high performance (i.e. top 20% based on annual performance ratings). Rather, high performers were distinguished by personal networks that were larger and more diverse than those of average performers. Based on these results we offer a network diagnostic to help knowledge workers assess personal network effectiveness.

Second, we conducted interviews with high performers in each organization to learn how they maintain expertise, utilize technical resources and develop/employ their personal networks. Here we learned that high performers are particularly effective experiential learners with customized informational environments. They also employ unique networking strategies that contribute to their ability to rapidly solve problems. Implications for leadership, organizational design and technology to support high performance practices are drawn from this phase of the research.

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