Social Capital and Transactive Memory Systems in Work Groups: a Multilevel Approach

A multilevel, multi-theoretical model of transactive memory was developed by integrating the emergence model with social capital theories. Empirical tests showed that individual social capital significantly impacted the development of the micro-level component of transactive memories, but collective social capital did not significantly influence the development of macrolevel transactive memories. INTRODUCTION The burgeoning research interest in studying how organizations pool these distributed resources together has brought about fundamental changes in how we conceptualize organizational cognition. One major change is recognition of the importance of communication for organizational learning (Weick & Ashford, 2000). Communication provides not only conduits for information exchange, but also mechanisms to generate, transfer and retain knowledge (Wegner, 1987). Conscious efforts have been made to incorporate communication in organizational learning theory. One prominent example is Wegner’s transactive memory theory (1987; 1995). He proposes that a transactive memory system is “a group information-processing system” (1987, p 191) made up of individual memory systems, as well as communication processes linking them together. In the past two decades, the theory has attracted considerable attention in the research community about the developmental processes of transactive memories and their impact on performance (Brandon & Hollingshead, 2004; Liang, Moreland, & Argote, 1995; Moreland & Myaskovsky, 2000; Rulke & Rau, 2000; Wegner, 1987, 1995). Although transactive memory theory has shown great promise for understanding distributed intelligence, the theory needs further development in two critical areas: cross-level linkages and network properties. First, the theory falls short of spelling out the multilevel nature of group cognition. Wegner (1995) argues that individual directory updating, information allocation and information retrieval are vital for the development of shared transactive memory systems (p. 320). In essence, transactive memory is a macro-level concept describing collective cognition. But the actual actions of encoding, storage and retrieval of knowledge are all taken by individual persons at the micro level. How do the three individual-level actions produce results