Can agile collaboration practices enhance knowledge creation between cross-functional teams?

Agile philosophy emphasizes constant interactions and close collaboration between team members. This emergent management philosophy relies on a set of practices that aim at creating an environment in which teams are able to respond rapidly to customer's needs and to deal effectively with changing situations. From this perspective, agile practices can be viewed as a way to enhance knowledge creation and knowledge sharing between team members. However these emergent practices necessitate an environment that facilitates communication and coordination mechanisms. The present paper aims at analyzing how large organizations, characterized by distributed and cross-functional teams, can cultivate an agile environment where inter-individual knowledge exchanges are encouraged. Even though mutual adjustments and face to face interactions are not easily achieved in large and distributed organizations, the contributions of agile practices in such contexts remain significant. These practices can foster knowledge development and collective learning processes and subsequently improve organization's adaptability.