The Relationships Of Transactive Memory System, Learning And Creativity

With the increasing visibility of teams in organizations, there is a great challenge for the teams to coordinate and utilize their members'knowledge. A central concern of team's knowledge coordination has to do with transactive memory system (TMS), which is defined as the shared division of cognitive labor regarding group members' encoding, storage, retrieval, and communication of information from different knowledge domains. Prior research in project laboratory and ad hoc groups has highlighted the roles of TMS not only in improving team knowledge acquisition, but also in enhancing team knowledge process which foster creativity, but field research has lagged because the mechanism surrounding the TMS-creativity link is not well understood, which makes exploring the black box of their relationship crucial.Drawing on the data from operational teams held in a comprehensive university and enterprises in China, this study presents a multilevel framework for understanding TMS as a learning system that affects individual and team creativity.This study examines the mechanism of TMS influencing individual and team creativity. It unfolds as follows:first, it examines the mediating role of team learning in the relationship of TMS, individual creativity and team creativity. Second, it validates the mediating roles of two dimensions of team learning involving local learning and distal learning between TMS and creativity. Third, it specifies the team local learning into individual level involving exploitative learning and explorative learning for testing their different effects on the relationship between TMS and individual creativity. Finally, it aggregates the individual exploitative learning and explorative learning to team level to examine their distinguished roles in the relationship between TMS and team creativity.What's more, this study tests the moderators, for example the moderating roles of team social capital and team knowledge diversity between TMS and team creativity, and the moderating effect of leader's innovation support on the relationship between exploitative learning, explorative learning and creativity. In considering the role of moderators, this study adds to a growing body of literature focusing on how the effects of TMS are context-dependent, and adds more generally to the emerging interest in multilevel influences in team outcome providing further evidence for the promise of this approach.This study also explores the interactive relationship between TMS and learning behaviors by case study. With the sample of R & D teams in high-tech enterprises, it examines their interaction in different phrases of TMS.This study thus makes a number of contributions to the TMS literature and also provides an important caveat regarding the benefits of learning. It is an attempt to advance knowledge in following areas.First, it explores the mediating role of learning behaviors between TMS and creativity step by step. It starts with team learning, then specifies it into local and distal learning and finally explores exploitative learning and explorative learning which are two different learning behaviors of local learning by multilevel analysis. The results show the mediating effect of exploitative learning but there is no mediating effect of explorative learning. This study broadens our understanding of the effect of TMS from a team learning perspective.Second, using hierarchical linear modeling, it examines multilevel relationship of TMS, learning behaviors and creativity. Previous work on TMS has focused on either individual or group level analysis. This study proposes learning behaviors in both levels are influened by TMS, furthermore, they have different effects on creativity in different levels. That is, when aggregated to the group level, exploitative learning and explorative learning could explain team creativity in different ways. By developing a multilevel framework and providing a more comprehensive picture of what kind of learning behaviors engaging in the relationship between TMS and creativity, this study not only contributes to the understanding of the mechanism of TMS, but also broadens our understanding of different effects of multilevel learning behaviors.Third, it constructs and validates the two dimensions of individual learning behaviors involving exploitative learning and explorative learning with discussion and data collection, which contributes to the understanding of the individual exploitative learning and explorative learning.Forth, it contributes to a growingbody of work exploring the context of TMS on creativity, which enriches our knowledge about the mechanism of TMS. The moderating factors include team social capital, team knowledge diversity and leader's innovation support.Fifth, while most of TMS studies have been conducted in laboratory settings or have relied on either student samples or teams in a single organization, this study has used several samples in China to fill this gap. The samples of the study are representative because one of these is ad hoc group, while others are long-term team samples with different interactive ways and learning atmosphere. It provides more evidence for this study.Finally, it explores the interactive relationship between TMS and learning behaviors by case study. Prior research tends to treat TMS as evolving linearly, using static measures rather than assessing development over time. In response, this study offers a model emphasizing cyclical aspects of TMS development and it proposes the relationship between TMS and learning behaviors during the development of TMS.