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Introduction
The challenges involved in transferring knowledge within an organization are important for both managers and researchers (Argote et al. , 2000; Kogut and Zander, 1992). The knowledge-based view of the firm characterizes organizations as communities specializing in knowledge creation and transfer (Kogut and Zander, 1996), which provides a source of competitive advantage (Arrow, 1974; Kogut and Zander, 1992; Kane, 2010). A distinctive feature of this characterization is its focus on social aspects of knowledge; for knowledge to be valuable at an organizational level it must be held and shared across multiple individuals or units within the firm. The processes through which knowledge migrates and evolves through transfer constitute an important capability for firms. Our understanding of such processes has benefited from study through a variety of lenses, including network theory (e.g. Reagans et al. , 2004), organizational learning (e.g. Uzzi and Lancaster, 1996), trust (Levin and Cross, 2004), power (Raman and Bharadwaj, 2012), and evolutionary theory (Zander and Kogut, 1995).
Tsai and Ghoshal (1998) proposed modeling knowledge transfer (KT) as a process incorporating social interaction and dyadic trust as antecedents to the production of knowledge conducive to value creation. Hansen (2002) and Reagans and McEvily (2003) extended this understanding through a robust examination of social network structure and the strength of interpersonal connections (tie strength), finding that strong ties and weak ties have differing effects on KT, and these effects vary with overall social network structure. By focusing on network effects, however, these studies omitted important variables such as trust. Levin and Cross (2004) reintroduced trust as a mitigating and moderating factor for explaining the relationship between network structure and transfer of useful knowledge, arguing that examining trust as a mechanism between network structure and successful KT helps explain the inconsistent findings among prior studies of the effect of strong ties on KT.
As the number of factors known to influence KT has expanded, so has understanding of the structure through which KT occurs. Reagans and Zuckerman (2001) emphasize a multi-level network analysis, arguing that the structure of social networks within an organization should be analyzed in terms of two distinct characteristics - the structure of relationships within a given team and the structure of relationships across teams. This view is particularly useful...