Developing a Knowledge-Based Organizational Performance Model for Discontinuous Participatory Enterprises

Our research seeks to understand how to extend established organization theory and emerging knowledge-flow theory to inform the design of organizations with discontinuous participation. Because knowledge flows enable workflows, and work determines performance, theory suggests the organization of knowledge-particularly tacit knowledge-is critical for competitive advantage. However, tacit knowledge does not flow well through the enterprise, and it attenuates particularly quickly in organizations that experience discontinuous participation. In this paper we build upon an ethnographic study and computational organization theory (COT) to model and analyze discontinuous participation in the domain of facility development. We find organizational design characteristics such as task interdependency affect flows of tacit knowledge and hence work performance in the enterprise. Computational and analytical results suggest how we can extend organization theory to address the dynamics of knowledge flows when designing organizations with discontinuous participation.