Exploring The Role Of ICT In The Formation Of Transactive Memory Systems In Virtual Teams

This paper is a research in progress. Virtual teams (VTs) are increasingly common in organizations, yet explicit research on VTs’ performance is relatively rare. One of the key challenges faced by individuals in VTs is the awareness of ‘who knows what’ and ‘who does what’ in the team. One of the solutions offered by past research in overcoming these key challenges is for teams to form Transactive Memory Systems (TMS). However, previous research on TMS has been limited and focused primarily on face-to-face teams yielding inconsistent results with respect to TMS formation in VTs. Therefore, the goal of this research is to explore and describe the formation of TMS in VTs. Our focus will be on the role of ICT as a communication tool to foster TMS formation. We intend to empirically examine this role, using a model derived from Brandon and Hollingshead (2004) as basis. We propose to use a large-scale survey to test our augmentation of this model. It is hoped that this study will provide a deeper understanding of the use of ICT as a communication tool during the formation of TMS in VTs.