A Relational Foundation of Knowledge Production: Advice-Seeking in Knowledge-Based Organizations

Abstract

In the past decade, the revolutionary advancement of technology brought the attention of academics and management practitioners to the innovative capability of organizations. Companies in knowledgeintensive industries increasingly focus on their ability of self-renewal and adaptation. Concurrently, organizational processes that support the amassment, management, sharing, and employment of knowledge have grown in importance. Organizational social network analysis provides the apparatus to explore knowledge networks in organizations by identifying relationships through which knowledge and information flow. Advice-seeking relationships have an essential role in knowledge production as they enable actors to acquire information, professional support, and knowledge elements they can recombine to form new knowledge. Advice-seeking always assumes trust between actors: by asking for help, one necessarily exposes their weakness to the other. What other relational conditions might there be of advice-seeking in organizational knowledge networks? What are the prerequisites for asking for help? In this paper, I examine the case of two knowledge-based organizations, both located in Hungary: (1) a business services center (390 employees) that offers professional services to B2B partners and (2) a higher education institution (583 employees). I analyzed data collected by a Budapest-based management consultancy that specializes in organizational social network research. I found that most independent variables were significant in the regression models. However, there was a notable difference between each variable’s relative explanatory power in the two cases. While process- and decisionrelated relationships seemed essential in the business services center, informal communication and interpersonal trust were more critical for advice-seeking relationships to form in the higher education institution.