In brief, the motivation for conducting this study has been the societal changes brought upon the Covid-19 pandemic from a socio-economic perspective. The outbreak of the pandemic has resulted in that companies faced major organizational challenges to adapt to the virtual working setting in terms of communicating and transferring knowledge. Hence, the purpose of this study is to investigate whether firms that adopt new technologies for communication (e.g. Microsoft Teams or Zoom) and adapt to virtual working settings are positively or negatively affected in terms of barriers to knowledge transfer. Thus, the focus of has been on finding potential benefits and/or drawbacks of transferring knowledge in a virtual setting. The following research question has been answered to cover this: How is digital transformation, in terms of increased adoption of novel communication technologies driven by Covid-19, affecting barriers to knowledge transfer in an intra-unit setting in multinational corporations (MNCs)? In order to study this, the authors conducted 10 semi-structured interviews with participants from one department at Ernst & Young (EY). The empirical data have been analyzed with a conceptual framework that the authors have developed themselves. Based on the exploratory investigation, the authors draw the conclusion that knowledge-related barriers have decreased due to the increased adoption of novel technologies, while relational barriers have increased overall. Yet, we suggest that the relational barriers could be further mitigated, by incorporating an approach similar to EY’s hybrid model into the firm’s organizational routine.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-480143 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Karhukorpi, Henry, Cirhinlioglu, Burak |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Företagsekonomiska institutionen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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