ABSTRACT
Scholars and practitioners have identified the management of organizational knowledge
as a key source of competitive advantage, particularly in complex organizations that
consist of multiple divisions, products, and units. In particular, distributed local
knowledge in an organization becomes organizational knowledge when different parts of
the organization possess or know where to acquire this knowledge (Lessard & Zaheer,
1996). The problem of integrating and making distributed knowledge widely available is
particularly interesting in the complex organization because pockets of knowledge may
exist across organizational boundaries and may even span nations and cultures (Bartlett,
1986; Ghoshal & Bartlett, 1988).
