Secondments: a tool for interorganizational knowledge transfer

Abstract

First essay: Systematic literature review on the practice of secondments is presented, as this has been studied in various fields, such as in health sciences, education, business and management and politics. The main purpose of the literature review is to synthesise the current state of knowledge in the practice of secondments by answering the following questions: a) where is the practice of secondments being used (organisations or business); b) what are the different
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types of secondments; c) who do secondments affect; and d) how they affect each party. I further identify shortages in the current literature of secondments, which provides fruitful avenues for future research.
Second Essay: It is suggested that secondments where the host organisation employs full time but temporary employees from a different organisation can improve hosts’ ability to select novel ideas. Seconded employees are conceptualised as dual identity by being, simultaneously, external experts and temporal insiders at the host organisation. This dual identity allows them to infuse the host organisation with continuously updated tacit knowledge, which then helps permanent employees to better comprehend and, subsequently, promote novelty. These predictions have been tested using the secondment program at the National Science Foundation. Leveraging a number of program features, treatment and control groups have been constructed, which yield estimates supporting my arguments. Permanent employees grant more novel awards when they interact with seconded academics. The effect is substantially stronger when secondees and permanent employees share common knowledge maps.
Third essay: Seconded employees who join a different organisation than the organisation of their origin for a temporary period, have been found to face several challenges in their integration into the host organisation. These challenges are mainly attributed to their poor integration of the host organisations or cultural differences between the host and the home organisations. Utilising insights from the Human Capital Theory, it has been suggested that secondees’ difficulty in becoming adapted to the host organisation’s environment is related to the lack of firm-specific knowledge on the host organisation’s unique organisational routines and procedures. However, permanent employees of the host organisation hold relevant organisation-specific knowledge. Therefore, grasping on the literature on workgroups and social learning theory, I found that when seconded employees interact contently with permanent employees, by working under the same group with them, the latter facilitate a quicker and easier integration for their seconded colleagues. To support these theoretical findings, a qualitative design with in-depth interviews has been used with both seconded and permanent employees of the National Science Foundation. The qualitative findings are being complemented by quantitave evidence on awards granted by rotators at the NSF, which confirm the qualitative results.

Date of Award	25 May 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Dimo Dimov (Supervisor), Virgilio Failla (Supervisor) & Christos Kolympiris (Supervisor)