Learning in Knowledge Team: Can Passion in Teams' Activities Help?

This study investigates the antecedents of individual learning under knowledge team environments, where team members work together for a limited time period, share knowledge informally and eventually create a knowledge outcome that is beneficial for an organization. Participating in a knowledge team provides individual members with a good opportunity to learn during a short period of time, since they work on novel and creative tasks. However, because knowledge team activities are often nonroutine for each member, their attitudes toward and psychological involvement with their knowledge team activities vary among different individuals. In this study, we suggest that individual passion about knowledge team activities is an important psychological input for individual members' external knowledge sourcing, internal knowledge sharing, and helping behaviors, which eventually lead to improving an individual's learning outcomes through knowledge team activities. We hypothesize that individual passion about the activities in a knowledge team positively influences both 1) knowledge management (sourcing and sharing) behavior; and 2) the organizational citizenship behavior - helping (OCB-helping) of individuals, and these behaviors, in turn, result in their learning outcomes. Also, members' perceived psychological safety within knowledge teams positively moderates the impact of members' passion on internal knowledge sharing and helping behavior on learning outcomes. The research model will be tested with survey data from the knowledge team participants. We conclude with potential contributions of this study for the academy and practice.