Organizational learning and knowledge transfer are central to the performance of organizations. The growing fragmentation and internationalization of productive activities, however, has led to new organizational forms whose geographic distribution poses challenges to organizational learning and knowledge transfer. While a wealth of literature has begun to blossom in this area over the past decade, understanding the impact of geographic dispersion on organizational learning and knowledge transfer poses unique challenges.
One particularly challenging aspect of this area of study is teasing apart the relative effects of different variables associated with geographic distribution and the organizational context. At the beginning of this chapter we presented a framework in which organizational learning begins with experience and ends with knowledge. National, technical, and social contexts moderate the relationship between organizational experience and knowledge. As we noted in the last section, however, there are interactions between the national, technical, and social contexts and a given geographically distributed project will have a particular combination of the three.
Beyond the interaction between contexts, however, studying organizational learning in a geographically distributed context also poses other challenges for teasing apart the relative effects of different dimensions of geographic distribution. In particular, geographic dispersion has several underlying dimensions including geographic distance, electronic dependence, and whether temporal and national boundaries are crossed. Each of these dimensions poses different challenges for organizational learning and knowledge transfer. In this day and age it will be difficult to find geographic dispersion without some amount of electronic dependence, although the type of electronic dependence may vary. It is challenging to imagine a case of a multi-unit organization that does not involve geographic dispersion. Such challenges may make it difficult to distinguish between the challenges for communication and coordination posed by multiple units versus by geographic dispersion. On the other hand, a geographically distributed organization can, but must not necessarily, cross temporal and national boundaries. Conveniently, each of these variables can be found without examples of the other. For example, a geographically distributed organization can be imagined that crosses temporal but not national boundaries, that crosses national but not temporal boundaries, and that crosses both national and temporal boundaries. It is difficult, however, to imagine an organization that crosses national or temporal boundaries that is not geographically distributed.
In addition to challenges of teasing apart the effects of different variables, another challenging but also exciting aspect of geographically distributed organizations is the constant change in the environment being studied. Due to the growing fragmentation and internationalization of firm activities, today geographically distributed firms vary in the size, age, and the very reasons for which they are distributed. In addition, the technical, and in particular IT, options to support communication and collaboration in geographically distributed organizations also continue to change. Such changes provide exciting opportunities to continually reinvent and reinvigorate our understanding of geographically distributed learning and knowledge transfer.
Another particularly interesting area for future research is the rapidly changing relationship between technology—in particular the type of knowledge and the structure of the design—and geographic dispersion. Newly emerging research suggests that many cases do not support the hypothesis that organizational patterns will correspond to the technical patterns of dependency in a system under development (Colfer and Baldwin, 2010). Other work has questioned the extent to which any task can be labeled fully modular or integral (Tripathy and Eppinger, 2008). These results suggest a prime opportunity to reframe the existing discussion on the aspects of technology that may influence the geographic distribution of work. Particularly interesting will also be to understand the extent to which new developments in electronic media and team composition and management may be leading to these observed changes.
Both the challenges in teasing out the effects of different variables and the rapid change in the nature and opportunities for geographically distributed organizations provide exciting opportunities for future work in the study of organizational learning and knowledge transfer in geographically distributed organizations. One particularly interesting area for future work is teasing out the tension between the costs of geographic dispersion and the benefits that may come from being able to successfully leverage location-specific knowledge or capabilities. In the interaction between national and technical context, significant work remains to understand the extent to which local production differences and their significance for the economic viability of new technologies are understood by managers and the speed with which organizations may be able to learn and integrate these differences into their production and product development decisions. Likewise, it will be important to understand the extent to which new forms of electronic media and team composition and management may change outcomes in the above contexts. Finally, further research is needed to understand in which contexts distributed teams may be able to outperform local ones by leveraging location-specific capabilities versus in which contexts costs for organizational learning and knowledge transfer across geographic distance outweigh these benefits. Understanding these questions will enable us to advance the practice as well as theory of learning and knowledge transfer in geographically distributed organizations.
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a We wish to acknowledge the National Science Foundation (Grant SBE-0965442) for its support of our research.