Research shows that teams comprised of individuals with differing knowledge are increasingly important to enabling innovation in organizations. Beyond diverse connections, research also shows individuals must be familiar with their collaborators’ areas of expertise to effectively integrate knowledge. Despite growing recognition of the importance of familiarity for interdisciplinary collaboration, we argue that there is reason to suspect this form of relationship is likely to be particularly rare in organizations. We present an egocentric analysis of collaboration networks in a scientific organization, exploring factors associated with the copresence of interdisciplinary ties alongside familiarity with a collaborator’s area of expertise. Our results demonstrate pressures toward similarity of expertise that minimized connections to differing alters. Furthermore, those respondents who had diverse connections tended to be unfamiliar with their distant collaborators’ domains. Interaction counteracted this effect but participants reported pressures inhibiting interaction across knowledge boundaries. The findings demonstrate how network forces compound to inhibit what we call “different yet familiar” ties and, by doing so, offer conceptual and practical implications for contemporary organizations.

研究表明，由具有不同知识的个人组成的团队对于实现组织创新越来越重要。除了各种联系之外，研究还表明，个人必须熟悉合作者的专业知识才能有效整合知识。尽管人们越来越认识到熟悉对于跨学科合作的重要性，但我们认为，有理由怀疑这种关系形式在组织中尤其罕见。我们对一个科学组织中的协作网络进行以自我为中心的分析，探索与跨学科联系的共存以及熟悉协作者专业领域相关的因素。我们的结果表明，在专业知识相似性方面的压力会最大程度地减少与不同变更之间的联系。此外，那些具有多种联系的受访者往往不熟悉他们遥远的合作者的领域。交互作用抵消了这种影响，但参与者报告称压力限制了跨知识边界的交互作用。研究结果表明，网络如何迫使人们复合以抑制我们所谓的“不同而又熟悉”的联系，从而为当代组织提供概念和实践意义。