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MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING NATIONAL ECONOMICS UNIVERSITY  NGUYEN LAN NGOC DYNAMICS OF KNOWLEDGE SHARING IN PROFESSIONAL SERVICE TEAMS PHD DISSERTATION SPECIALIZATION: BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION Hanoi – 2022 MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING NATIONAL ECONOMICS UNIVERSITY  NGUYEN LAN NGOC DYNAMICS OF KNOWLEDGE SHARING IN PROFESSIONAL SERVICE TEAMS SPECIALIZATION: BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION SPECIALIZATION CODE: 9340101 PHD DISSERTATION Supervisor: Assoc. Phan Thi Thuc Anh Hanoi - 2022 DECLARATION I have read and understood the University’s policy on plagiarism. I hereby declare on my honor that this research proposal is my own work and does not violate the regulations on good academic practices. PhD candidate i Table of Contents 1.

Research objectives and research questions. Subjects and scope of the research. Original contributions of the research. Structure of the dissertation .9 CHAPTER 1 – LITERATURE REVIEW.

Overview of work teams and project teams. Definitions and types of work teams. Definitions and characteristics of project teams. Overview of knowledge, knowledge sharing, team knowledge sharing.

Definitions and Types of knowledge. Definitions of knowledge sharing, team knowledge sharing, and dynamics of team knowledge sharing. Roles of team knowledge sharing. Factors influencing team knowledge sharing.

Overview of motivation and motivations of team knowledge sharing. Overview of professional service firms. Definition and types of professional service firms. Importance of team knowledge sharing in professional service firms.

Research Gaps in Team knowledge sharing literature. 43 SUMMARY OF CHAPTER 1. 46 CHAPTER 2 – THEORETICAL FOUNDATION. Rationales for the choice of Groups as complex systems theory and Incentive theory.

Key ideas of Groups as complex systems theory and Incentive theory. Key ideas of Group as complex systems theory. Key ideas of Incentive theory. Applications of Groups as complex systems theory and Incentive theory in prior studies.

Application of Groups as complex system theory in prior studies. Application of Incentive theory in prior studies. Applications of Groups as complex systems theory and Incentive theory for Dynamics of Knowledge sharing in professional service project teams. Modes of project life in professional service project teams.

Team knowledge sharing and Functions of professional service project teams. Team knowledge sharing and Composition of professional service project teams. Team knowledge sharing and the causal dynamics in professional service project teams. 61 SUMMARY OF CHAPTER 2.

62 CHAPTER 3 – RESEARCH METHODOLOGY. Reasons for choosing the exploratory sequential mixed methods research 64 3. Mixed method research design. Research context – Audit industry in Vietnam and audit project teams.

General mixed methods research design. Qualitative data collection and data analysis. Qualitative data collection procedures. Qualitative data analysis.

Data quality procedures. Quantitative data collection and data analysis. 92 SUMMARY OF CHAPTER 3. 92 CHAPTER 4 – FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS.

Qualitative data analysis and findings. Interactions of team knowledge sharing elements at Stage 1 – Planning 93 4. Interactions of team knowledge sharing elements at Stage 2 – Execution. Interactions of team knowledge sharing elements at Stage 3 – Completion.

General model of Team knowledge sharing dynamics. Quantitative data analysis and findings. Measure reliability and validity. 119 SUMMARY OF CHAPTER 4.

131 CHAPTER 5 – DISCUSSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS. Recommendations for team leaders or project leaders at team level. Recommendations for team members at individual level. Recommendations for top managers at organization level.

147 SUMMARY OF CHAPTER 5. 153 APPENDIX 1: INTERVIEW GUIDE. 184 APPENDIX 2: SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE. 186 APPENDIX 3: EXAMPLE OF PRELIMINARY MANUAL CODING PROCESS.

190 APPENDIX 4: EXAMPLE OF CODING LEVEL 1. 191 APPENDIX 5: EXAMPLE OF CODING LEVEL 2. 192 APPENDIX 6: EXAMPLE OF CODING LEVEL 3. 193 APPENDIX 7: EXAMPLES OF THE CODING RESULTS.

194 iv LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES Table 1.1: Summary of representative studies on taxonomy of knowledge .2: A summary of the empirical studies on the roles of team knowledge sharing .3: A summary of empirical studies on factors influencing knowledge sharing within teams .1: Number of audit firms in Vietnam in the period 2019ậ2020 .2: Workforce of audit firms in Vietnam in the period 2019ậ2020 .3: Data collection methods .4: Profile of Interviewees .5: Definitions and coding scheme .6: Profile of respondents.7: Measurement scales of variables .1: Summary of hypotheses on Team Knowledge sharing Dynamics .2: Validity and Reliability of Variables .4: Mauchly’s test of sphericity .7: Summary of the research findings.1: The exploratory mixed methods research design .1: Model of Team knowledge sharing dynamics. Rationale In the era of knowledge economy, knowledge sharing is central to firms’ growth and success (Cavaliere & Lombardi, 2015; Prusak & Davenport, 1998). As a significant constituent of knowledge management (Riege, 2005), knowledge sharing helps individuals to contribute to knowledge application, innovation, and achieving sustainable competitive advantage (Jackson et al. Knowledge sharing has been found to be positively related with reduced production costs, faster completion of new product development projects, team performance, firm innovation capabilities, and firm performance including sales growth and revenue from new products and services (Arthur & Huntley, 2005; Collins & Smith, 2006; Cummings, 2001; Lin, 2007; Mesmer- Magnus & DeChurch, 2009).

Thus, a large body of research has produced extensive explanations of the knowledge sharing processes (e., Bruton et al., 2007; Huang et al., 2008; Lin, 2011; Ma & Yu, 2010; Sechi et al. It has done so using various angles, levels of analysis, and by paying attention to various selected aspects (Kepczyk, 2000; Sergeeva & Andreeva, 2016). The previous studies have made significant contributions to our understanding of knowledge sharing within organizations. Particularly, in the context of team which is considered as the crucial building block in today’s knowledge-based organizations, knowledge sharing is an important factor affecting team performance because for attainment of common goals, team members with unevenly distributed expertise and knowledge need to interact regularly and depend on each other.

In professional service firms, where most work is done by project teams delivering customized client services, project teams are becoming more commonly used to take advantage of resources and enhance competitive advantages (Batistič & Kenda, 2018; Fu et al. Professional service firms have received widespread attention from both practitioners and researchers because professional services are an increasingly important driver of economic activity in the knowledge economy (Hertog, 2000; Kox, 2004), and in this setting, the process of sharing knowledge has been identified as a key source of competitive advantage (Carmel, 2005). Processes within project teams for coordinating resources to solve 1 problems, implement procedures, and complete tasks has attracted the attention of both researchers and practitioners in the past decade (Carter et al. Among these processes, there are an increasing number of studies on the importance of productive knowledge sharing behavior (Zhang & Min, 2019) that plays significant roles in team performance and project delivery (Ahmad & Karim, 2019; Calamel et al.

Professional service firms are characterized by knowledge intensity, low capital intensity, and professionalized workforce (Von Nordenflycht, 2010), and categorized into technology developers, professional campuses, neo professional service firms and classical professional service firms (von Nordenflycht, 2014). On the base of technical aspect, technology developers, professional campuses are technical professional service firms with enough capital, they can invest in unique machinery, tools or equipment to deliver services. Neo professional service firms and classical professional service firms are nontechnical professional service firms which rely more on their internal and external management of knowledge. However, most empirical studies of knowledge sharing are focused on technical professional service firms or technological perspective (Wang & Noe, 2010).

Among the non-technical professional service firms, audit firms have the most comprehensive characteristics of professional service firms. Knowledge sharing is especially vital in auditing firms, as these firms depend on the quality of services provided by their professionals to succeed (Curtis & Taylor, 2018; Vera Munoz et al. To be specific, audit firms are put under high pressure to improve quality, efficiency, and effectiveness of audit process because of regulatory environment, updating auditing standards, and scandal events related to financial fraud. Furthermore, in each audit engagement, knowledge about the client’s environment, industry, business model, and operations are typically distributed unevenly among audit team members (Harding & Trotman, 1999; Kerr & Murthy, 2004).

Therefore, knowledge sharing capability of industry-specific trends, accounting, auditing, regulatory issues determine the outcome of the audit services. Despite the potential importance of knowledge sharing to auditing firms, accounting practitioners and scholars have made little progress in understanding its anatomy (Vera Munoz et al. 2 While knowledge sharing and its related processes in teams are inherently dynamic (Heizmann & Olsson, 2015; Kwok & Gao, 2005), prior research has mostly explained these team processes through static models. Especially at different stages of the project team life cycle, these team processes have been studied at a certain stage of a project rather than considering their impacts at different project stages (Zhang & Guo, 2019).

Few have actually studied project teams over time to uncover work processes in a real life setting (Jørgensen, 2018). Failing to address team knowledge sharing dynamics can lead to insufficiently understanding the nature of this team process and hampers practical measures as different managerial interventions may be required at different project stages. In professional service teams, team members interact at all stages of the project to generate solutions and deliver customized services to clients (Gardner, 2015). Effective interactions among team members promote knowledge sharing along with new knowledge generation (Morris, 2001).

There raises a question that how team knowledge sharing changes in its dimensions as the project moves from one stage to the next. One of the most frequently studied dimensions of knowledge sharing is why people share knowledge. This dimension is criticized for being not clearly delineated (Nguyen et al., 2019; Stenius et al., 2016) and managerially impractical (Foss et al. Empirically, how to motivate professionals to share their knowledge is still challenging, especially in professional service teams (Fu et al.

As knowledge sharing in teams is both goal driven and social exchange (Zhao et al., 2021), what motivate people to contribute their efforts and resources during the project time are contingent upon the nature of team goals, tasks, and social interactions among team members. Hence, the economic, sociological, and psychological aspects should simultaneously be brought into the picture of motivation to share knowledge within project teams. What people share as the other important dimension of knowledge sharing has suggested to be different at each project stage (Gomes et al. While knowledge in team process exists in different typologies, it has been mostly treated as one single construct in the team knowledge sharing literature (Ahmad & Karim, 2019).

This is unfortunate since the nature and relevance of knowledge shared for a specific task are critical for the achievement of team goals (Ahmad & Karim, 2019). Thus, without 3 consideration of sharing different knowledge types, there may lead to the insufficient explanation of team knowledge sharing. The theory of groups as complex systems (Arrow et al., 2000) provides some insights on the dynamics of team knowledge sharing. This theory proposes that groups are complex and dynamic systems in which the group behaviors change over the group life course, yielding temporal patterns of development.

The group behaviors involve interactions across at least three levels including constituent elements of groups, the group as an entity, and the contexts in which a group is embedded. Besides, the theory proposes that the priorities a group placed on its various functions do not remain static but interplay dynamically over time. In this view, the nature of knowledge sharing among team members changes over the project stages to complete the project tasks, fulfill members’ needs, and maintain the team integrity. However, it has not been clear that what and how team elements related to knowledge sharing interact and change as the project teams move from one stage to the next.