Managing experts by managing diversity: Individual motivations for sharing expertise in work teams

One of the great challenges in information-sharing and knowledge management in teams is the sharing of expertise. In this paper, a model of expertise in teams is suggested that conceptualizes expertise not only as professional knowledge but also as expert role from a status perspective. The model predicts that experts will reduce their contributions to the team goals if their expert status is threatened in any way, but will increase their knowledge sharing behaviour if their status in the team is confirmed. The hypotheses were confirmed in two experimental studies (N1=98, N2=144), showing that explicitly declaring status differences increased expert contributions. These contributions could be further enhanced by giving individual performance feedback to experts, and were decreased under team feedback conditions. The findings are consistent with recent research showing that diversity can contribute to team performance if the diversity is recognized within the team.