Robert D. O'Keefe

Bio: Robert D. O'Keefe is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Organizational communication & Key (cryptography). The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 25 citations.

A Study of Key Communicators in Research and Development laboratories

Abstract: Although much has been written to document the existence of the key- communicator role, relatively little attention has been directed toward determining the factors that motivate an individual to a...

Demography and Design: Predictors of New Product Team Performance

Abstract: The increasing reliance on teams in organizations raises the question of how these teams should be formed. Should they be formed completely of engineers or should they include a range of specialists? Should they be made up to people who have long tenure in the organization, or those with a wide range of experience? As teams increasingly get called upon to do more complex tasks and to cross functional boundaries within the organization, conventional wisdom has suggested that teams be composed of more diverse members. This study suggests that the answer may not be so simple. Using 409 individuals from 45 new product teams in five high-technology companies, this study investigates the impact of diversity on team performance. We found that functional and tenure diversity each has its own distinct effects. The greater the functional diversity, the more team members communicated outside the team's boundaries. This communication was with a variety of groups such as marketing, manufacturing, and top management. T...

Organizational Demography: The Differential Effects of Age and Tenure Distributions on Technical Communication

Abstract: Although previous researchers have proposed organizational demography as an important determinant of communication, no one has tested this relationship directly. Further, distinctions between the i...

Informal technology transfer between firms: cooperation through information trading

Abstract: Employees frequently give technical information or advice to colleagues in other firms, including direct competitors. This paper addresses whether such information-transfer is in the economic interests of the firms involved. It is hypothesized that employees trade information in accordance with the economic interests of their firms. Conditions are discussed in which information trading creates an economic advantage for the participating firms. Data on specific information transfer decisions were obtained from a survey of 294 technically oriented middle-level managers from the U.S. specialty steel and mini-mill industry. The observed pattern of information transfer strongly supports the hypotheses (1) that employees trade information and (2) that such trading is desirable from a firm's point of view. Furthermore, the data suggest a positive link between the participation of a firm's employees in informal informationtransfer networks and the economic performance of the firm. Indeed, it can be in a firm's interest to make its boundaries penetrable for informal information trading rather than to discourage such transfers.

The Effects of Communication on Technological Innovation

Abstract: This study examined the relationship between communication and technological innovation. It focused on the patterns of technical communication among researchers and organizations to find out if these patterns had any effect on the success of technological innovation. The objectives were to: (1) investigate the effects of communication on technological innovation at an individual level, and (2) study the effects of interorganizational communication on technological innovation. Data were gathered from the principal investigators of 117 Sea Grant research projects, which were randomly selected from a sampling frame of 495 projects. Bivariate correlation, and partial correlation, were employed in analyzing the data. The findings indicate that at the individual level, the frequency, centrality, and diversity of communication all have positive effects on the success of technological innovation. However, the frequency of communication was found to have a greater effect than either centrality or diversity of comm...