The Impact of Transactive Memory Systems on Team Performance

Purpose – The paper aims to combine TMS with knowledge management outcomes to investigate their impact on team performance based on an integrative research framework. Two types of social ties (instrumental ties and expressive ties) are also investigated as moderators to explore their impact on the relationship between TMS and knowledge quality.Design/methodology/approach – We conduct a survey to test our research hypotheses. Our final data set consisted of 249 individuals from 61 teams in 34 companies.Findings – Results indicate that TMS have a positive impact on team performance mediated by knowledge management outcomes. We further found that instrumental ties could strengthen the relationship between specialization and knowledge quality, while weaken the influence of coordination on knowledge quality. In contrast, the results showed that expressive ties weaken the relationship between specialization and knowledge quality, while strengthen the influence of coordination on knowledge quality.Research limitations/implications – This study involved a cross-sectional design instead of investigating team work from a long term perspective. Future research could conduct a longitudinal project to investigate how TMSs form and how TMSs at different levels of maturity may affect team performance through perceived knowledge satisfaction. Further, we only examined a few of the factors as intermediate outcomes of KM from the knowledge perspective rather than the capability of the team.Practical implications – When initiating KM projects, managers should focus on employees' perceived knowledge satisfaction since the essence of KM is to focus on people, specifically the way people think, work and interact. Simply assigning employees with different types of expertise into a single team is unlikely to produce the desired results unless they can develop mutual credibility and coordinate their tasks effectively. To achieve such outcomes, they will need to feel comfortable in their work context – and comfortable to exchange knowledge with their team members