How Do Social Networks Affect Organizational Knowledge Utilization?

In this paper we focus on the question how interpersonal network structures affect the degree of organization wide knowledge utilization. Coordinating the balance between knowledge utilization and knowledge generation is important for organizations (cf. March, 1991). Organizational structures that coordinate this balance can be characterized by people (knowledge carriers), resources (knowledge), and tasks (knowledge users and producers) and the set of relationships linking them (Carley & Krackhardt, 1999). As we define knowledge utilization as the extend to which tasks transfer useful or required knowledge to subsequent tasks, we can measure knowledge utilization in terms of these relationships. Especially, task assignment (relations between tasks and people) plays an important role in this measure of knowledge utilization. In this paper we empirically study the effect of different social network measures (relationships among people) on task assignment. With the empirical parameters we find we show through simulations how network characteristics affect the degree of knowledge utilization within the organization as a whole.