Transactive Memory System in Work Teams from High Technology Firms and Its Consequences
高技术工作团队的交互记忆系统及其效果

Transactive memory system(TMS) has been recently identified as an important factor to influence team performance.TMS is the shared division of cognitive labor with respect to the encoding,storage,retrieval,and communication of information from different domains that often develops as team members have better understanding of each other's expertise.Accumulating evidence has shown that TMS explains team performance in the laboratory,but few studies have been conducted in field settings because there is no proper TMS measure for field settings.We examined the relationships between TMS and other phenomena with a large sample of 190 high-tech work teams in China.We found that two items in the TMS scale developed by Lewis(2003) should be dropped.Furthermore,our results indicate that,TMS is significantly related to trust among team members and the extent to which team members share a cooperative goal.In addition,TMS is both positively related to team performance rated by the team manager and significantly related to team cohesion.In this study,individual members' scores on various constructs were aggregated into the corresponding team-level scores,and the high agreement index(r_(wg)) among team members legitimize the aggregation.This method should be followed in examining(organizational) phenomena at the team/group level.