Team Information Elaboration Research Articles

The Catalyst Effect: The Impact of Transactive Memory System Structure on Team Performance

Research on transactive memory systems (TMSs) implicitly assumes that metaknowledge (i.e., the “knowledge of who knows what”) is uniformly distributed among team members. Relaxing this assumption results in a more realistic notion of team cognition in which the distribution of metaknowledge can take different forms. Demonstrating the importance of this conceptual shift, we compare teams in which metaknowledge is concentrated within one central member (a centralized TMS structure) with teams in which metaknowledge is distributed evenly among the members (a decentralized TMS structure). We predict that centralized metaknowledge can give teams a performance advantage over decentralized metaknowledge, because centralized metaknowledge can allow the central member to function as a catalyst for information exchange and integration. We propose this catalyst effect to be contingent on the extent to which the distribution of task information among members poses high coordination demands to effectively integrate members' knowledge. In a laboratory team decision-making experiment (n = 112), we found the predicted interaction effect between TMS structure and the distribution of task information. Furthermore, the experiment supported our hypotheses about the mediating role of the transactive retrieval process and the ensuing team information elaboration.

Cultural Diversity and Team Performance: The Role of Team Member Goal Orientation

As workforce diversity increases, knowledge of factors influencing whether cultural diversity results in team performance benefits is of growing importance. Complementing and extending earlier research, we develop and test theory about how achievement setting readily activates team member goal orientations that influence the diversity-performance relationship. In two studies, we identify goal orientation as a moderator of the performance benefits of cultural diversity and team information elaboration as the underlying process. Cultural diversity is more positive for team performance when team members' learning approach orientation is high and performance avoidance orientation is low. This effect is exerted via team information elaboration.

Fostering team creativity: Perspective taking as key to unlocking diversity's potential.

Despite the clear importance of team creativity for organizations, the conditions that foster it are not very well understood. Even though diversity, especially diversity of perspectives and knowledge, is frequently argued to stimulate higher creativity in teams, empirical findings on this relationship remain inconsistent. We have developed a theoretical model in which the effect of a team's diversity on its creativity is moderated by the degree to which team members engage in perspective taking. We propose that perspective taking helps realize the creative benefits of diversity of perspectives by fostering information elaboration. Results of a laboratory experiment support the hypothesized interaction between diversity and perspective taking on team creativity. Diverse teams performed more creatively than homogeneous teams when they engaged in perspective taking, but not when they were not instructed to take their team members' perspectives. Team information elaboration was found to mediate this moderated effect and was associated with a stronger indirect effect than mere information sharing or task conflict. Our results point to perspective taking as an important mechanism to unlock diversity's potential for team creativity.