Research On Relationship Between Transactive Memory And Project Performace In Software Outsourcing

With the rapid development of economy and information technology, as the effective means of optimizing cost structure, assisting industry transforming and upgrading, software outsourcing services has been booming in China where has advantage of manpower. As software outsourcing is a knowledge intensive industry, team performance and project success rely heavily on team’s knowledge ability. A variety of specialized knowledge used to complete software project are distributed in different team members, in order to achieve effective knowledge management and integration,team members have to know what kind of knowledge they need and knowledge’s position. More and more scholars emphasize improving the outsourcing performance through knowledge cooperation. As a system based on cognitive, transactive memory system (TMS) has gradually been applied to technical development project performance research. Relative research scholars in this field has proved that TMS has a positive effect on team survival ability, team performance, satisfaction, pressure relief and so on[I].TMS working in outsourcing team is influenced by many factors. On the one hand, software outsourcing team is exposed to the social environment, and team cognitive system of specialty knowledge is formed through social interaction, the close social relationships which established through information exchange will affect members’behavior and attitudes. On the other hand, as dynamic changes (mainly knowledge) and structure complexity exist in software outsourcing tasks, and TMS emphasizes knowledge division and cooperation, so the knowledge dynamic complexity and knowledge structure complexity should influence the process of the TMS in software project. Based on how software outsourcing team effectively to improve project performance, this paper introduces transactive memory system theory, respectively, with social identity related to team relationship and project complexity related to team task, to analysis their interaction affection on project performance. This paper chooses 149 outsourcing teams which have software outsourcing experiences as research objects,we conduct a structural equation modeling and a hypothesis testing using SPSS19.0, SMART PLS2.0. The research results indicate that:(1) Transactive memory system, which promotes knowledge transferring and sharing between the clients and venders, can be used as an effective knowledge integration tool in software outsourcing team.(2)As the "binder" in software outsourcing team, social identity which can benefit team knowledge collaboration has a positive impact on project performance.(3) Social identity plays a negative moderating role in the relationship between transactive memory system and project performance. High levels of social identity can cause a strong emotional connection between members, which likely lead to ignore the accuracy of the knowledge.(4) Project dynamic complexity plays a negative moderating role in the relationship between transactive memory system and project performance. The project structure complexity does not play a moderating role. We should keep reasonable use of transactive memory system in the case of different complexities.