An Opportunity for Mutual Learning between Organizational Learning and Global Strategy Researchers: Transactive Memory Systems

Abstract

The concept of transactive memory systems affords an opportunity for organizational learning and global strategy researchers to learn from each other to their mutual benefit. A transactive memory system is a collective system for encoding, storing, and retrieving information. Teams with well‐developed transactive memory systems have been found to perform better on a variety of tasks than teams lacking such memory systems. The preponderance of research on transactive memory systems has been at the team level of analysis. I argue that extending the concept of transactive memory to the organizational level and studying the concept in global firms would advance knowledge about transactive memory systems as well as increase our understanding of global strategy.