Network-biased Technical Change: How Information Management Tools Overcome Some Biases but Exacerbate Others.

Organizations have long sought to improve employee performance by managing knowledge more effectively. In this paper, we test whether the adoption of digital tools for expertise search and access within an organization, often referred to as a support to an organization’s transactive memory system (TMS), improves employee performance. Using three years of data from more than 1,000 employees at a large professional services firm, we find that adopting an expertise search tool improves employee performance on financial dimensions, which results from improvements in network connections and information diversity. However, it does not affect all employees equally. We find that two types of employees appear to benefit from adoption more than others. First, traditionally information-disadvantaged employees (junior employees and women) appear to gain more from the adoption of Digital TMS tools (DTMS) because the tool overcomes the institutional barriers to resource access that these employees face in searching for knowledge. Second, employees with greater structural capital at the time of adoption also benefit more, because the tool eliminates natural networking barriers present in traditional offline interpersonal networks, allowing these employees to network more strategically. We also find that communication volume increases more for junior employees and women and increases it less for people with strong social networks, suggesting the mechanisms that benefit people with strong networks differ from those for women and junior employees, a finding consistent with our theoretical mechanisms. Taken together, an important implication of these findings is that implementing and adopting expert search tools for TMS has the potential to shift organizational sources of power and influence away from demographic-based characteristics and toward network-based ones—a characteristic we call “network-biased technical change."