Abstract
Communities of practice are rapidly becoming part of management's everyday vocabulary as many firms are now actively creating the conditions to support communities of practice within company walls. In some cases, firms are even "organizing" them in the hope of increasing competitive advantage or improving the organizational learning process. However, empirical research on the relationship between communities of practice and organizational performance is extremely limited; thus, there is little empirical support for management's efforts to enhance organizational performance through communities of practice. This research is an exploratory effort to fill that research gap through the case study of several communities of practice consisting of construction managers, engineers and supervisors within the scope of a multibillion-dollar construction project. Using the concept of learning curves, we find that the communities of practice operating under stable conditions exhibited static or improved performance. However, at one community of practice where a physical move reduced the ability of its members to interact in informal and formal face-to-face exchanges, there was a period of declining performance associated with the move.