How does transactive memory system affect a process of collaborative working and its results?

Abstract

It’s been about 30 years since Daniel Wegner published some studies, which later became the foundation of transactive memory system (TMS) concept. The purpose of this literature reviewis to describe systematically what aspects of teamwork TMS influences. In this paper, we review 33 empirical studies published since 2000 to 2016. We have divided all the studies into seven groups based on what the main aspect of teamwork is described in every study. Each group is discussed separately. We found out that developed TMS positively influences on the level of entrepreneurial orientation and creativity, promotes the effectiveness of decision-making process and creating, sharing and applicationof knowledge, helps to maintain innovativeness of the team and organizational ambidexterity and also reduces information overloads. However, researchers have problems with measuring the binding force between TMS and long-term performance indicators, such as the annual sales growth. The article includes a brief summary of the reviewed studies with main results, descriptions of the sample and context in Appendix 1. We also found that TMS scale by Lewis (2003) is the most popular approach to measuring TMS in the field. We put the original version of the scale and its translation in Appendix 2. Currently, there aren’t studies on TMS in Russian academic literature. We hope our paper will become a starting point to fill this gap and contribute more studies about impact of the TMS on entrepreneurship, creativity and decision-making process.