Towards Successful Knowledge Integration in Online Collaboration: An Experiment on the Role of Meta-Knowledge

Successful knowledge integration, that is, systematic synthesis of unshared information, is key to success, but at the same time a challenging venture for teams with distributed knowledge collaborating online. For example, teams with heterogeneous knowledge often have only vague or even wrong ideas about who knows what. This situation is further complicated if the collaboration partners do not know each other and merely communicate online. Previous research has found meta-knowledge, that is, knowledge about one’s own and the partner’s knowledge areas, to be a promising but not yet sufficiently investigated approach to promote knowledge integration. With our experimental study we aimed to address this desideratum of research on the role of meta-knowledge in net-based collaborations. We “simulated” a chat-based collabo-ration between partners with heterogeneous knowledge by assigning specific information to students collaborating in dyads on a Hidden Profile task. To arrive at the correct joint solution for this task, collabo-rating partners had to pool their shared, but more importantly their unshared information. We compared two conditions: In the experimental condition meta-knowledge was promoted by providing the collabora-tion partners with self-presentations of each other’s roles, which pointed to their unique fields of knowledge, while participants in the control condition did not receive this information. Results suggest a positive impact of the meta-knowledge manipulation on two key factors of collaboration: knowledge integration and construction of a transactive memory system (TMS).