COORDINATING KNOWLEDGE CREATION IN MULTIDISCIPLINARY TEAMS: A PROCESS MODEL OF TASK UNCERTAINTY, STRUCTURES, AND PRACTICES

Using a multi-year field study of early-stage drug discovery teams at a leading pharmaceutical company, we examine how specialists from different scientific domains coordinated knowledge creation under intense task uncertainty. A key insight is that the interaction between formal and informal coordination in multidisciplinary teams hinges on the locus of task uncertainty relative to the domains involved in knowledge creation. The findings demonstrate that by structuring and restructuring sub-teams around a jointly defined locus of task uncertainty, specialists fostered a set of coordination practices that enabled them to engage in heedful, timely, and validated knowledge creation. We present a process model explaining how coordination structure and coordination practices interact in team-based knowledge creation. The model advances the long-standing debate on the advantages and shortcomings of research on coordination in knowledge work, a debate that has largely ignored the interdependencies between informal and formal coordination.