Organizations have realized that effective development and management of their organizational knowledge base is very important for their survival in todays competitive business environment. People, as a special knowledge asset, also attract the interest of many researchers because, only through people communicating with one another, can they really share their tacit knowledge and skills that can be more valuable than explicit documentation. The need to be able to quickly locate experts among the heterogeneous data sources stored in the organizational memory has been recognized by many researchers.

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Engineering and Management. He has also served as an ad-hoc reviewer for this journal. His interest areas include new product development and entrepreneurship, uncertainty and strategy choice. Richard R. Reilly holds the Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee and is a Research Professor in the Howe School of Technology Management. Before joining Stevens, Dr. Reilly was a research psychologist for Bell Laboratories, the Educational Testing Service and AT&T.

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trust levels in the workplace for the 1990s. In the monograph, we reviewed how the psychological contract of trust that had existed for years during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s had been decimated by greed, short-term focus, global competition, and, at times, the unethical behavior of leaders; the 1980s brought a rampant “merger mania”; then there was the inflation and subsequent bursting of the Internet-fueled technology bubble over the course of the 1990s and into the new millennium. As these phenomena unfolded, employee commitment, enthusiasm, and passion declined precipitously. No longer did employees believe that their current employers represented long-term career options. Additional factors in the new century have further frayed employees ’ perceptions of and feelings toward their employers. The economy sputtered and senior executives, feeling the pressure of expectations created by the prosperity of the 90s, took drastic measures in attempts to appease stockholders and Wall

This paper examines team learning behavior; a set of complementary actions that teams engage in to improve their outcomes. We theorize about the impetus that is subsistent within a number of designfactors, both internal and external to the team. Regarding a team’s composition, we investigate the potentially concurrent effects of demographic heterogeneity and subgroup salience. Models using data on 156 teams in five pharmaceutical firms showed that demographic heterogeneity was significant if resulting subgroup salience was controlled for; both very homogeneous and very heterogeneous teams were more inclined to engage in learning behavior. The existence of demographic subgroups in teams may also trigger learning behavior – provided that these subgroups are not too distinct. With regard to organizational context, the results indicate that active external leader encouragement, team empowerment, and the availability of a knowledge management system stimulate learning behavior, but mostly so if all are present concurrently. 2 Over the last few decades, we have witnessed an increasing emphasis in organizations on issues such as flexibility, innovation, and learning. In response, organizations have adopted flat, decentralized structures in which teams are expected to play an important role coping with the uncertainty in the