If managers want their employees to share information, why do they encourage them to hoard it by rewarding competition among them? My colleagues Erik Brynjolfsson at MIT and Nat Bulkley at the University of Michigan and I have been studying knowledge sharing and productivity in the executive recruiting industry. We asked 71 employees, from partners to IT staff, at three recruiting firms about their compensation structures and their attitudes toward sharing information with colleagues, and we tracked their individual contract revenues and the e-mail activity among them.
A version of this article appeared in the September 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review.
