Neither Here nor There: Knowledge Sharing and Transfer with Proactive Structuration

Information technologies hold great promise in their ability to link distributed workers, allowing organizations to take advantage of the potential benefits of effectively gathering knowledge without regard to geographic boundaries. This can be advantageous for an organization's overall capabilities, given that employing workers from diverse backgrounds can increase an organization's knowledge base. Paradoxically, these technologies may also serve to dampen knowledge sharing, unless proactively managed. This paper extends work on adaptive structuration theory and sensemaking to develop the concept of proactive structuration. We explain how organizations and teams can proactively manage distributed work arrangements to best position the team to take advantage of knowledge sharing for enhanced performance