Leveraging Team Expertise Location Awareness in Improving Team Improvisation: A Dynamic Knowledge Integration Perspective

PURPOSE: The uncertainties in the market have led to an increasing number of uncertainties and unexpected situations in the work environment of organizations. Based on information processing theory, we investigate how teams can dynamically integrate the expertise of their members to better respond to an uncertain market environment. We propose an important team cognition: team expertise location awareness and point out its unique impact on knowledge integration and thus on improvisation capabilities. In addition, we argue that shared leadership facilitates the use of team recognition resources by teams. METHODS: This study adopts a multi-source design approach and collects data from an information technology (IT) company that provides apps of voice socialization and game for foreign markets in southern China. Our sample comprised 86 IT teams, and hierarchical regression and bootstrapping methods are also employed to test the hypotheses. RESULTS: This study reveals that (1) team’s expertise location awareness positively influences the team’s knowledge integration ability which in turn enhances the team’s improvisational ability; (2) team’s knowledge integration mediates the effect of team’s expertise location awareness and team’s improvisational ability; (3) shared leadership moderated this above mediation effect. CONCLUSION: In this paper, we introduce information processing theory into team improvisation research to understand why some teams can effectively utilize and integrate their members’ knowledge and information and further contribute to effective team improvisation. These results’ theoretical and practical implications for team expertise location awareness, team knowledge integration, shared leadership, and team improvisation are discussed.