Explaining dyadic expertise use in knowledge work teams: An opportunity–ability–motivation perspective

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2286
• Published date: 01 July 2018
• Date: 01 July 2018

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Explaining dyadic expertise use in knowledge work teams: An

opportunity–ability–motivation perspective

Woonki Hong

1

|Ravi Shanker Gajendran

2

1

School of Business Administration, Ulsan

National Institute of Science and Technology,

Ulsan, Korea

2

College of Business, Florida International

University, Miami, Florida, U.S.A.

*Both authors contributed equally to the

paper. Woonki Hong was responsible for data

collection and analysis.

Correspondence

Woonki Hong, School of Business

Administration, Ulsan National Institute of

Science and Technology, Unist‐gil 50, BAB114

706‐8, Ulsan 44919, Korea.

Email: hong@unist.ac.kr

Summary

Organizations use project teams to lower search costs associated with locating exper-

tise by assembling requisite expertise within a single unit. But prior research suggests

that availability of expertise in teams does not guarantee its use. When are team

members more likely to reach out to their peers for their expertise? To answer this

question, this paper develops a theoretical model predicting dyadic expertise use in

teams based on the opportunity–ability–motivation framework of behavior in organi-

zations. We argue that 3 complementary conditions influence dyadic expertise use in

teams: A focal team member is more likely to use a peer's expertise in a specific

domain when the peer is perceived to have valuable expertise (opportunity), when

the member is psychologically empowered (motivation), and when the member shares

a strong tie with the peer (ability). We tested our framework using a 2‐wave dataset

consisting of 1,898 observations of dyadic domain‐specific peer expertise use based

on 71 members rating 166 peers nested within 22 teams. Findings suggest that tie

strength and psychological empowerment jointly moderate the relationship between

perceived peer expertise level and peer expertise use.

KEYWORDS

expertise awareness, expertise use, knowledge transfer, psychological empowerment, tie strength

1|INTRODUCTION

Effective use of employee knowledge and expertise is a key source of

organizational learning and competitive advantage (Argote & Ingram,

2000). The prototypical instance of expertise use in organizations

occurs when an employee encounters a work‐related issue or problem

and reaches out to a peer for expertise or insight (Cross & Sproull, 2004;

Nebus, 2006; Richardson & Taylor, 2012). Seeking inputs from peers

with relevant expertise could improve the quality, efficiency, and inno-

vativeness of employees' own work outputs (e.g., Ho & Wong, 2009;

Reagans, Argote, & Brooks, 2005; Szulanski, 1996). Given the impor-

tance of peer expertise for organizational learning and performance

(Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998), this paper explores drivers of peer exper-

tise use between member–peer dyads embedded in project teams.

Organizations rely on project teams to enable timely access to

critical knowledge and expertise for project team members. Such

teams bring together individuals with different but complementary

knowledge, skills, and work experiences for accomplishing

knowledge‐intensive work such as research and development, soft-

ware development, and consulting (Edmondson & Nembhard, 2009;

Sydow, Lindkvist, & DeFillippi, 2004). Yet a key problem is that merely

assembling individuals with relevant expertise in teams does not

automatically guarantee that team members will seek out their peers'

expertise (e.g., Adler & Kwon, 2002; Austin, 2003; Bunderson, 2003;

Faraj & Sproull, 2000; Menon, Thompson, & Choi, 2006; Moreland,

1999; Thomas‐Hunt, Ogden, & Neale, 2003; Wegner, 1987). This paper

seeks to address this unresolved problem by adopting a dyadic perspec-

tive to team expertise use. Specifically, we ask: When are team mem-

bers more likely to turn to their peers for seeking out their expertise?

Partial answers to this question are dispersed across multiple

research domains. For instance, research on expertise sharing in the

teams literature emphasizes the importance of awareness of peer

expertise. This includes work on transactive memory systems (Lewis,

2003; Wegner, 1987), hidden profiles (Stasser, 1992), and expert

Received: 7 September 2016 Revised: 12 February 2018 Accepted: 15 March 2018

DOI: 10.1002/job.2286

796 Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J Organ Behav. 2018;39:796–811.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job

influence in small groups (Bunderson, 2003), all of which converge on

the idea that team member awareness that another member possesses

relevant specialized expertise is sufficient to access and use that exper-

tise. Such awareness, however, only creates the opportunity to seek out

expertise but does not automatically imply its use. Indeed, research

domains outside the teams literature have examined ability and motiva-

tion as drivers of expertise use in organizations. Given awareness of

peer expertise, members must be able to assimilate peer expertise

and peers must have the ability to transfer expertise. Reflecting this,

research on knowledge transfer from the social networks tradition

has emphasized ability by theorizing that tie strength between mem-

bers of a dyad enhances their capability for transferring complex exper-

tise (Hansen, 1999). However, this research tradition either does not

address motivation to seek knowledge or implicitly assumes that it is

inherent in network characteristics (e.g., Burt, 1992; Granovetter,

1973; Hansen, 1999; Reagans & McEvily, 2003). Other research in

the strategy literature has emphasized the importance of motivation

for interunit knowledge transfer but has only investigated the motiva-

tions of expertise providers but has not examined those of expertise

seekers (e.g., Gupta & Govindarajan, 2000). Yet team members who

are not motivated may be less likely to seek out available peer

expertise, but research thus far has not fully addressed this possibility.

Altogether, existing research streams provide an incomplete pic-

ture of peer expertise use in teams. This study seeks to knit together

these disparate lines of research by drawing on the opportunity–abil-

ity–motivation framework (Blumberg & Pringle, 1982) as a theoretical

lens to examine expertise use in teams. This framework's central pre-

diction is that workplace behavior is better explained by considering

opportunity, ability, and motivation together than by considering each

element separately or by considering subsets of elements. Our inte-

grated theoretical model reflects this thesis (Figure 1). It proposes a

joint interactive effect of three predictors drawn from prior theorizing

on expertise use to explain when a focal project team member is likely

turn to a peer for expertise in a specific domain. The first predictor—

perceived level of peer expertise—represents the opportunity to seek

peer expertise and is based on theorizing on expertise sharing from

the teams literature. Tie strength, our second predictor, is drawn from

theorizing on social networks, which posits that it represents dyadic

ability to effectively exchange complex knowledge and expertise

(Hansen, 1999). Our third predictor—psychological empowerment, a

type of intrinsic task motivation (Thomas & Velthouse, 1990)—is

drawn from theorizing about work itself as a source of motivation.

Our paper's central contribution is that it advances theorizing

about the microfoundations of expertise use in project teams by inte-

grating hitherto unrelated streams of research on the phenomenon into

a unified model. Doing so, our study builds bridges between research

on knowledge transfer in organizations, expertise use in teams, and

research on intrinsic task motivation. Research on dyadic knowledge

transfer from the social networks literature proposes that tie strength

is a key predictor, but studies in this tradition have largely ignored the

microdynamics of expertise seeking and use; instead they have mostly

inferred that expertise use has occurred by linking network character-

istics to unit outcomes (Hansen, 2002; Reagans & McEvily, 2003; Uzzi,

1996) or have examined the implications of knowledge transfer on key

outcomes (e.g., Haas, 2006b; Haas & Hansen, 2005). Furthermore,

although many studies in this tradition investigate project teams (e.g.,

Haas & Hansen, 2005; Hansen, 1999; Tortoriello, Reagans, & McEvily,

2012), they do not incorporate theorizing about expertise use from the

teams literature. Likewise, research on expertise sharing in the teams

literature focuses on awareness of “who knows what”as predicting

expertise use (Austin, 2003; Lewis & Herndon, 2011) but does not con-

sider tie strength as a key factor. Moreover, both streams of research

take for granted member motivation to seek expertise from a peer.

However, although motivation can play an important role in breaking

down social barriers to expertise seeking in teams and organizations

(Flynn & Lake, 2008; Lee, 2002), very little is known about whether

motivation matters for expertise seeking. Instead, what little research

exists focuses on extrinsic motivators of knowledge provision such as

incentives (e.g., Gupta & Govindarajan, 2000) and perceived interunit

competition (Hansen, Mors, & Løvås, 2005). Thus, another novel con-

tribution is our paper's focus on the intrinsic task motivation of exper-

tise seekers, which addresses an important gap about the role of

motivation for peer expertise use in teams.

Finally, our study's focus on domain‐specific expertise differs from

prior research examining knowledge transfer, which has typically

focused on the overall expertise of a focal individual (e.g., Borgatti &

Cross, 2003; Bunderson, 2003; Van der Vegt, Bunderson, &

Oosterhof, 2006). However, individuals could have more or less exper-

tise across multiple domains, and this within‐person variance in

domain‐specific expertise is not accounted for by prior research,

which has primarily examined between‐person variance in overall

expertise. By treating expertise at a more granular level, this provides

a richer and more accurate picture of when any particular member is

more likely to be sought out for their expertise.

2|BACKGROUND AND HYPOTHESES

The term “expertise”in this paper refers to a project team member's

specialized task‐oriented knowledge and skills relevant to fulfilling

FIGURE 1 Theoretical framework

HONG AND GAJENDRAN 797