Knowledge sharing
and team cooperation
徐扬XU Yang
Email: yang.xu@pku.edu.cn

A brief introduction of our department
 Department of Information Management of Peking University wasfounded in 1947, and it is one of departments that establishedlibrary and information science (LIS) earliest in China. Now,
bachelor, master and PhD degrees can be delivered, and postdoc
stations are also included.
 Every year, the department accepts about 40 undergraduate
students (20% of them are foreign students), 30 master candidates
and 15 PhD candidates. About 20% students (including
undergraduate students, master candidates and PhD candidates
are sent abroad (U.S., Europe, Japan, HK, etc.) for academic
exchange and study).
 There are 32 teachers in our department and most of them havestudy experience abroad or graduated from foreign universities.

Introduction Knowledge should be shared to be valuable, so
effective team cooperation is a crucial problem.
 Knowledge exchange and sharing are very
important and helpful in coordinating actions ofunits. However, when “knowledge explosion” hasbrought much more knowledge to people than ever,it has also generated too much miscellaneous
knowledge which people feel annoying andinconvenient when selecting and discriminating theknowledge received. As a result, a challenge in is toinvestigate the effects of cooperation and search fora “best cooperation degree”.

Two aspects
 When studying knowledge sharing, there are mainly two
aspects to be considered Receiver’s ability of acceptance. This is the receiver’s
attribute, and this parameter describes the knowledge
receiver’s ability in understanding the knowledge, judging
whether it is suitable to be considered in further processingactivities.
 Expressing ability of knowledge. This is the knowledge’s
attribute, determined by the knowledge provider. Inknowledge sharing, it is supposed that there is a protocol
which requires that for each piece of knowledge, a partshould serve as a tag to express the information of theknowledge (such as the abstract of a paper)

Working time allocation

 Part 1: Choosing the received knowledge. This partmakes the judgments about the suitability of theknowledge received
 Part 2: Production. This part is used for production
and to yield outputs
 Part 3: Pretreatment of the created knowledge to besent.

Modeling process- parameters and hypotheses
 Team size: the number of members in a team and is noted by n.
 Each unit of output is accompanied with one unit of knowledge
generated  and the expressing ability of knowledge are inverselyproportional.
  and the expressing ability of knowledge are directly
proportional Team members are mutually dependent on one another One unit of production time yields one unit of output
 One unit of production time needs one unit of costModeling process- derivation

 1. 0   ,  ,   1m
 2.   g  g2
 3. g  g  m  0

 4. g m
1  4m  1
 5.  2
1  4m  1
2

1  4m  1
2

 6. (n  1)

 7.  (n  1)

 8. 1   (n  1)  1  9.   (n  1)  1

 10.

 11. C (n)  k * n

P ( n) 1  4m  1
2m
1  4m  12*n
 (n  1)  1

Modeling result
 The productivity interest is The final result of the modeling process and theproductivity interest is determined by threeparameters. By studying the relationship them, wecan obtain some interesting conclusions, which canmake knowledge sharing and teamwork cooperation
more efficient in practice.

Sensitivity analysis I

Conclusion I
 When the team size is small, the productivity interest increases
with the increment of working individuals, but when the team size
is over a threshold, the interest decreases with the increment ofworking individuals.
 This implies that there is a single optimal team size in acooperative task and increasing team size inadequately would
cause some negative effects on the productivity effect.
 A rational explanation is that: when the quantity of knowledge
increases greatly with the augmentation of the team size, the time
allocated to choose the received knowledge takes a great part of
the working time, resulting in the reduction of the production time.
Such reduction makes the increment of the productivity interest
insufficient to compensate the increment of the labor cost andresults in the decrement of the productivity interest.

Sensitivity analysis IIConclusion II Inferred from these curves, every I(n) has anextreme point, and with the increment of , theabscissa of the point (n* , I (n* )) diminishes.
 Such difference caused by the change of may be
explained as follow: if an individual need more time
to choose knowledge, the optimal size of such teamwill decrease so as to relieve the burden ofknowledge filtration.

Sensitivity analysis III

Conclusion III
 In the same team size, I(m,n) increases when mdecreases. In other words, improving the receiver’s
acceptance ability and knowledge expressing abilitycan increase the productivity interest, especiallywhen m is small, the effect of improving choosing
ability is remarkable.
 With a fixed m, there exists an optimal team size forthe working group so the number of working
individual should be controlled to get a maximum
productivity interest.

Summary
 Increasing team size inadequately may affect the team performance ina negative way, in other words, team size should be controlled andkept thin to some extend.
 Improving the acceptance ability of individuals can increase theproductivity interest. Generally, such ability might be strengthened bytraining and experience, or by the application of appropriate tools.
 If an individual needs more time in choosing knowledge, the optimal
size of such team will decrease so as to relieve the burden ofknowledge filtration. We may infer that in case that a team of a big sizeis needed, more efforts should be paid in enhancing knowledge
management abilities, including the selection part and pretreatmentpart.
 When the knowledge choosing ability cannot be promoted, whichusually exists in practice, an effective way to maximize productivity
interest is to control team size.

LOGO