Knowledge-Sharing Tensions in Multiteam Contexts: Idealized Openness and Conditional Closedness

Drawing on the literature on multiple team memberships (MTM), boundary management, and team knowledge sharing, this study examines how individuals navigate knowledge sharing across teams through a phronetic iterative analysis of 18 interviews with knowledge workers. Findings reveal two tensional themes, Idealized Openness and Conditional Closedness, which manifest across individual, interpersonal, team, and organizational levels. Findings also reveal that workers actively employ various communicative strategies to manage the two tensions when sharing or withholding knowledge across team boundaries. Implications focus on the romanticized norm of openness, and on extending MTM and multi-team system (MTS) theories in teams and organizations.