Managing individual knowledge creation with demographic faultlines: A case of university laboratories

ABSTRACT

Knowledge generated in university laboratories is a crucial resource for enhancing the research performance of universities, the very site for scientific discoveries and technological innovation. Since knowledge is created through interpersonal interactions, the demographic composition of university laboratories is critically linked to knowledge creation by individual researchers and the management of such knowledge creation processes. This research examines the demographic faultlines within university laboratories representing the compositional diversity of laboratory members and their impacts on knowledge creation within the laboratory setting. In particular, we designed a cross-level analysis to examine the relationship between team-level demographic faultlines in university laboratories and individual-level members’ creation of explicit and tacit knowledge. Our results based on a sample of 300 members from 46 labs at a research-oriented university reveal complex relationships among demographic composition, type of knowledge created through laboratory interactions, and other factors. It turns out that demographic faultlines are negatively related to individual explicit knowledge, whereas they show an inverted U-shaped relationship with individual tacit knowledge. Our findings suggest much more contextual impacts of the configuration of laboratory members on individual knowledge creation in university laboratories than studied so far.

KEYWORDS:

• Demographic faultline
• compositional dynamics
• individual explicit knowledge
• individual tacit knowledge
• university laboratory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Seolmin Yang

Seolmin Yang is a Ph.D. student at the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology). His current research interests include team science, team diversity, R&D management, and innovation policy.

So Young Kim

So Young Kim is the Chair of the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy and the Director of the Center for Science, Policy, and Society at KAIST. Her research deals with high-stake issues at the interface of S&T and public policy such as government R&D funding and evaluation.