Reputation, trust and the dynamics of leadership in communities of practice

The aim of this article is to propose a theoretical framework describing the internal organization of communities of practice in a dynamic perspective. More precisely, we argue that communities of practice adopt some specific patterns of internal organization where some of their members obtain a leadership status. Leaders contribute to cognitive advance of the community of practice by providing members with a consistent and coherent vision of its objectives. We identify two of their attributes as important for allowing them to fulfil their task: informational mimesis and mediation. Finally, we propose a simulation model describing the emergence of leadership as the outcome of a self-organizing process. We find that leaders correspond to members who are characterized by higher levels of activity in the community.This work has greatly benefited from comments by participants at the 3^rd ETE Workshop held in Sophia-Antipolis. Comments by Markus Becker, Antoine Bureth, Patrick Cohendet, Robin Cowan, Christophe Lerch, Julien Pénin are gratefully acknowledged. Remarks by two anonymous reviewers and the editor contributed to improve significantly the quality of the article. The usual disclaimer applies.     

Relationship between participation in communities of practice and organizational socialization in the early careers of South Korean IT employees

This paper focuses on the relationship between participation in communities of practice (CoP) and organizational socialization of informational technology employees in their early careers. In this paper, the authors limited their research to CoP, which were recognized and supported by the organization. Results showed that participation in CoP was more strongly related to adjustment (job satisfaction, organizational commitment and intention to remain) than to learning (sense of belonging to the organization and role comprehension) when the characteristics of CoP and the degree of participation were controlled. The intensity of participation in CoP was significantly related to the socialization outcomes while there were no relationships between the length of participation and the socialization outcomes. Recommendations for future research include the use of objective rather than self-reported data, longitudinal research, the identification of other variables related to learning in CoP, and consideration of variations in national and organizational culture.