Impact of Network Position and Knowledge Diversity on Knowledge Creation: The Empirical Setting of Research Communities

We examined the role of network position and knowledge diversity as related to new knowledge creation within a network of 239 academics from business administration departments at four universities. Analyses of their 1,827 publications involving 1,541 coauthors between 1986 and 2008 revealed an inverse U-shaped relationship between network centrality and knowledge creation. Moreover, knowledge diversity positively moderated the association between centrality and the quality of the knowledge created, but negatively moderated the centrality-knowledge quantity relationship. Copyright (C) 2012 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.