A Study Of The Development And Effects Of Transactive Memory System In Knowledge Teams

In the era of knowledge economy, knowledge has become an important asset for organizations. As the carrier of knowledge, knowledge workers and their teams become more and more important. For organizations, it plays a pivotal role in keeping core competence that to build knowledge teams of high-performance and put the intellectual capitals of knowledge workers into a full use, which is also worthy of study.Transactive memory system (TMS) is a construct from psychology which could explain how a group appears to absorb and share information as though it has a shared mind. TMS could give team members quick and coordinated access to one another’s specialized expertise, ensuring that a greater amount of task-relevant knowledge is brought to bear on team tasks, so that it can improve the knowledge sharing and knowledge integration automatically and consequently improve the team performance.As a whole team, its team performance is the result of each member’s behavior, and each member’s behavior will be affected by their personality traits. So as an important indicator of team performance, the personality traits of team members are worth being studied, too.Therefore, in order to study how to improve the performance of knowledge teams, this essay discussed several important questions from the view of TMS and Big Five personality.First and foremost, the development of TMS in knowledge teams was studied. TMS was measured by three sub-dimensions:expertise location, cognition-based trust and task-knowledge coordination. Then the impacts of task-oriented communication and socio-emotional communication on the three sub-dimensions of TMS were analyzed.Secondly, the internal mechanism of TMS and the impacts of the three sub-dimensions of TMS on team performance mediated by knowledge sharing were discussed.Finally, how the Big Five personality traits affect the development and functioning process of TMS in knowledge team was analyzed. It was discussed in two ways. First, the impacts of openness to experience on the TMS mediated by two kinds of communication were discussed. Second, whether the relationship between TMS and knowledge sharing is moderated by agreeableness was studied.By the data analysis of a sample of33knowledge teams, several conclusions were given.(1) Communication contents will improve the development of TMS in knowledge teams. Task-oriented communication could give team members quick access to one another’s specialized expertise, let them build trust quickly and consequently cooperate effectively. Meanwhile, emotional communication could also make team members locate others’expertise and build trust, though its function is not as strong as task-oriented communication.(2) The expertise recognition between team members improves task-knowledge coordination. Expertise location positively affects task-knowledge coordination, but cognition-based trust doesn’t. This is opposite to other researchers’conclusions. There are two reasons could be used to explain it, the first reason is that our sample includes several kinds of knowledge teams, some teams may work very well with a series of standardized work processes, the team members could complete task quickly without building trust between one another. Secondly, cognition-based trust may directly affect knowledge sharing and team performance without the mediation effects of task-knowledge coordination, subsequent analysis supported this view.(3) Knowledge sharing mediates the relationship between TMS and team performance. The relationship between task-knowledge coordination and team performance is fully mediated by knowledge sharing. This suggests that the team members’cognitive labor division and cooperation will fully promote knowledge sharing and consequently improve team performance. Moreover, the results of new structural equation model which is added new paths shows that, cognition-based trust will indirectly affect team performance by knowledge sharing.(4) The impacts of openness to experience on TMS and the moderation effect of agreeableness in the functioning process of TMS. Firstly, if a team has a relatively high score on openness to experience, it is easier to form a good task-oriented communication atmosphere and promote the development of TMS. Secondly, if a team has a relatively high score on agreeableness, the impact of task-knowledge coordination on knowledge sharing will be stronger.