Using Work Context and Levels of Expertise to Foster Person-to-Person Knowledge Exchange: A Concept for Connecting Knowledge Workers Based on (Socio-) Psychological Theories

Knowledge within organizations is increasingly distributed, which raises the challenge to connect the right individuals for knowledge exchange. This contribution analyzes this challenge and proposes a concept to connect the right individuals. We first investigate relevant theoretical models namely transactive memory theory, social capital theory for knowledge exchange and a model based on socio-motivational and problem solving theory to find relevant constructs. We then analyze the relevant state-of-the-art to find that all approaches have some limitations with respect to the theoretical models. Our proposed solution builds on task histories for the matching, and we show how it can be used to determine contextual overlap and level of expertise. We then describe a case study in which our concept was employed in a three month timeframe with 93 individuals. A survey after the case study showed that our assumptions concerning the relevance and benefit of context overlap are substantiated.