Transactive Memory - Development of Transactive Memory

Development of Transactive Memory

Much research has shown that a transactive memory system is primarily developed through interactions between team members. Training on the task that a group is expected to do together has been shown to assist in the development of a transactive memory system. In this study, when the group members were trained together, the team developed a stronger transactive memory system, recalled more information about the process, and made fewer errors compared to teams where individuals had gone through the same training but separately. The researchers concluded that the interactions that took place during the joint training allowed the team members to develop an understanding of their teammates' skills, assisted their search for relevant information about the task from their teammates, and asses the accuracy and reliability of this information. As a result, groups that trained together performed better in the task. In a later study, these same researchers also determined that familiarity with their teammates or liking didn't explain the differences between groups that were trained together and those that were not. In this study, the researchers gave the groups that didn't train together a team building exercise but they still did not do as well as the trained together group.

At the first stage in a group's life cycle, knowing each of the team members' expertise allows the group to distribute work in a more efficient way and allocate different assignments to team members that are the most qualified for these assignments. The existence of many interactions in the early stages of group formation provides each of the teammates the opportunity to get to know other team members' training, level of expertise or the lack of knowledge in certain areas, and develop a shared understanding of the task's requirements and the way that the total of the teammates knowledge combines together.

Hence, it seems that communication serves as a crucial component in the development of transactive memory. Yet, it seems that not any kind of communication and interaction between team members will bring to the construction of transactive memory. Communication, in general serves as a way of transferring information from one person to another, but for the purpose of transactive memory construction this communication must deal with information regarding the knowledge, expertise and relevant experience of other individuals in the system.

Moreland & Myaskovsky (2000) showed that transactive memory can be developed without any interaction between teammates. As a substitute to teammates' communication they provided group members feedback ranking team members' skills in the relevant task domains before they started performing the task. Although the feedback and the information regarding teammates knowledge was provided by the researchers and teammates did not communicate with each other beforehand, this information positively affected the team's transactive memory score and performance. This experiment demonstrated that the sharing specific information regarding team members' knowledge and domains of expertise formation is necessary for transactive memory development, either through direct interaction or by another means of information transformation.