The Power of Delusion: Perceived Balance as The Mechanism to Generate Knowledge in Networks.

The structural and the content-based views of the intraorganizational knowledge-sharing networks have overlooked the importance of the cognitive-psychological characteristics of such networks' nodes. In their very nature, the individual nodes have their own cognitive representation of the actual social structures. Though such perceptions need not be necessarily accurate, they are better determinants of the behaviors of individuals than the actual structures. The present paper is an attempt to explore the power of perception in deciding to collaborate and generate knowledge. I will explicitly take into account both the cognitive and the relational components of the embeddedness of knowledge-sharing procedures. I conceptualize the organizational actors as packages of knowledge, which form the knowledge network of the organization through collaborating in solving problems (co-patenting). Drawing from the balance theory, I discuss how the relationship between the number of knowledge clusters within organizations at time 't' and the probability of recombinant innovation at time 't+1' is moderated by the social distance (relational aspect). This moderation effect is mediated by the perceived balance in the friendship networks of people (cognitive aspect). A comparison between the effects of actual structures and perceived structures on the outcome is possible based on the results of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]