Abstract: Knowledge integration is of great strategic significance for project-based organizations (PBOs) to form their core competitiveness. However, its non-self-organizing characteristic is in urgent need of organizational system guarantee at the level of knowledge governance. As a formal governance mechanism, allocation of authority is considered to play an important role in the process of knowledge integration due to its functions of granting legitimacy to integrated knowledge and enabling the authority subject to obtain resources available for integration. However, facing different organizational situations and governance logic, there is still a lack of strong theoretical explanation on how allocation of authority of PBOs fits with knowledge integration. Therefore, this research adopts a multi-case study method and analyzes four PBOs to explore the matching relationships between authority allocation and knowledge integration. The study finds there are four typical matching relationships between authority allocation and knowledge integration in PBOs. Two situational factors, organizational normativeness and environmental uncertainty, are identified as critical contingencies that influence the matching relationships. The research results extend the knowledge governance research of PBOs from the boundary conditions of the matching relationship between authority allocation and knowledge integration, and provide useful reference for PBOs to set authority allocation for a better effect of knowledge integration.

Key words: project-based organizations, authority allocation, knowledge integration, knowledge governance