The Impact Of Transactive Memory System On Founding Team In Surprise Context

Entrepreneurial activity has played an important role in stimulating economic growth, promoting employment and improving per capita income. The research of entrepreneurship attracts wide attention from worldwide scholars and policy makers. However, due to the uncertainty of the entrepreneurial process and the insufficiency of the domestic entrepreneurial infrastructure, founding team often encounters surprises. A surprise may represent either an opportunity or a threat for a new venture. As the surprise is born with the characteristic of urgency, how to maintain the stability of the founding team to deal with the problems of surprise is vitally important.As knowledge plays an increasingly important role in modern enterprises, the paper chooses transactive memory system as the theoretical perspective. Transactive memory system helps to illustrate how the founding team uses its distributed expertise, cognitive interdependence and task coordination to integrate knowledge, social networks and other resources to respond quickly to unexpected surprises, thus maintaining the stability of the founding team. We test our hypotheses with survey data collected from159new ventures in four geographic regions of China (Hubei, Guangxi, Guangdong and Henan) with different levels of entrepreneurial activities.The results suggest that the founding team’s transactive memory system plays an important role in responding to the surprises. Specifically, teams with more developed transactive memory system can attain higher performance when surprises occur. And the founding team’s transactive memory system can help the team to stay stable when surprises happen. The stability of the founding team plays mediating effect between the founding team’s transactive memory system and founding team performance. In addition, the female members of the founding team also make some contributions in keeping the stability of the team.