Overview
I teach and conduct research in the area of
organizational communication. Specially, my research mainly focuses on knowledge transfer and
retention in organizations via the development of social
capital, and the adoption and usage of information and
communication technology. In an information society, timely
access to expert knowledge is crucial for employees to make
informed decisions. Yet locating true expert knowledge when needed can be a very challenging task. Most
organizational research on expertise seeking focuses
principally on the role of interpersonal relations in the
search process. One common oversight of these studies,
however, is that no attention has been paid to how employees
gain needed expert information from electronic resources.
Most information system research, on the other hand, focuses
mainly on designing and implementing new information systems
to facilitate expertise retrieval, assuming that advancement
in technology can provide a solution, only to find out that
some barriers in expertise seeking and retrieval are
interpersonal in nature. My research has therefore centered
on integrating organizational behavior and information
science research in studying knowledge management either
inside an organization or within a community. My goal is to
advance existing theories and develop new ones to study the
interplay between interpersonal and electronic resources for
expertise seeking and retention of expert knowledge from a
multilevel, network perspective.