Learning in project-based organizations: The role of project teams' social capital for overcoming barriers to learning

It is a major challenge for project-based organizations to learn across project boundaries by making project-level knowledge available to the organization as a whole. This study argues that project teams' social capital is conducive to overcoming barriers to learning in project-based organizations. Based on a large-scale analysis of engineering projects in Germany, the study shows that project teams' social capital, i.e. the intraorganizational social ties of project teams with their colleagues outside the project, compensates for project teams' lack of opportunity, motivation, and ability to make project-leamings available to the organization as a whole. By contributing to overcoming barriers to learning in project-based organizations, social capital represents an important driver of organizational learning about market conditions, products and technologies as well as project management. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. APM and IPMA. All rights reserved.