The Effects Of Informal Networks On R&D Team Performance: An Empirical Examination Take Transactive Memory System As Mediating Variable

Era of knowledge economy,innovation instead of comparative advantage became the basis ofworld economic competition. Enterprises no longer dependent on the possession of scarce resources,but through research and development of new technologies, new products to gain competitiveadvantage,R&D team has become a major form of innovation in modern enterprise.The reason why theteam can get better performance than the working group is that the active collaboration betweenmembers could create a "whole greater than its parts" effect in the team mode.With the R&D taskbecoming increasingly complex and knowledge more cross, any individual can not be independent andrapidly achieve their objectives, for R&D team, the level of performance depends not only on thewhole team have enough stock of knowledge but also on the condition of internal and externalnetworks of relationships, it is the transmission and distribution channels of new knowledge, new skills,new experience. From the perspective of social network management and knowledge management, thispaper study how informal networks impact on team performance.This paper fully draw domestic and foreign research，depth studied the meaning, measurement andrelationship between the informal networks within R&D team, interactive memory systems and teamperformance,and proposed theoretical models and corresponding assumptions based on the relationshipbetween the three variables.Meanwhile, we use154real data of R&D team in corporate to do anempirical test by SPSS and AMOS software.The study divided informal networks into interaction strength, network density, communicationquality, and network trust as four observed dimensions, and subdivided team performance into taskperformance and contextual performance as two sub-dimensions,Were studied the impact of the variousdimensions of informal networks to transactive memory system and team performance. The empiricalresults show that: the various dimensions of informal networks within the team showed a significantpositive impact to transactive memory system and team performance (including task performance andcontextual performance);transactive memory system displayed a significant positive impact to teamtask while little on contextual performance; transactive memory system is an intermediary variablebetween informal networks and task performance.In this study,the paper redefine the concept and composition of informal networks, interactivememory system and team performance according to the characteristics of R&D team.Meanwhile, thispaper integrated the three variables of the informal networks, interactive memory systems and R&Dteam performance into a framework to study the relationship between them. This research not only beinnovative in theory,but aslo have some guiding significance to building quality informal networks andimproving the operational efficiency of transactive memory system.