Managing Knowledge in Professional Service Firms: A Longitudinal Investigation

Abstract

The world is rapidly shifting from a production-based economy to a knowledge-based one, in which knowledge is one of the most critical sources of sustained competitive advantage. Professional service firms are prime examples of organizations with high knowledge intensity. Because knowledge emanates from and mostly resides within individuals, this dissertation concentrates on the microfoundations of knowledge creation, knowledge sharing, and knowledge retention in today’s professional service firms. Specifically, this work focuses on three distinctive contextual factors that shape how employees experience those knowledge processes: (i) billability, (ii) multiple team membership, and (iii) mentoring. This cumulative dissertation consists of three introductory parts and three coauthored essays based on large-scale longitudinal, multisource data collection in a professional service firm. Essay I examines employees’ imperative challenge of exhibiting creativity while working under the pressure of billability. The essay explores the mechanism through which an increase in prolonged time pressure affects employee creativity and examines the extent to which leader, team, and organizational support for creativity may help employees direct their self-regulatory resources towards creativity. Essay II investigates the implications of multiple team membership for employee socialization. The essay explores the mechanism and contingency factors underlying employees’ successful adjustment to their new roles while being expected to collaborate in multiple teams. Essay III examines the role of mentoring in employee turnover intentions. The essay analyzes how mentor-protégé disagreement in each party’s perceptions of their relationship quality affects protégés’ turnover intentions over time. The findings of this research are relevant to both theory and practice. First, this work adds to the scholarly understanding of the microfoundations of managing knowledge in professional service firms. Specifically, this dissertation contributes to the literature on employee creativity, socialization, proactivity, and voluntary turnover. Second, practitioners may find significant value in the research findings, which emphasize the role of team and organizational support for employee creativity, reveal that polychronic employees better benefit from multiple team membership, and establish the importance of aligning mentor-protégé expectations regarding mentoring to retain employees within organizations. Last, this work suggests several avenues for further research. Notably, future studies could ascertain whether the findings hold true in different organizational contexts in which billability, multiple team membership, and mentoring are less salient.