Learning Effects in Work Teams: Transactive Memory Systems and Team Performance

随着团队成员获得共同工作的经验，团队绩效会显著提高。这些“学习曲线”已经在许多团队环境中观察到，包括软件开发团队，医院手术团队和煤矿工人。 这个研究项目将研究团队经验的组成部分，以了解更多关于学习曲线收益背后的具体现象。研究人员将与团队寿命相关的一些绩效收益归因于“交互记忆”（TM）系统的发展，该系统涉及对团队中谁知道和做什么的意识。当一个团队有一个定义明确的TMS时，团队成员知道在特定技能或专业知识方面应该依靠谁。一系列实验室研究将操纵团队成员的知识和角色之间的匹配，以及团队成员共享共同语言的程度。实验将研究这些变量对团队绩效以及任务性质（例如，其不确定性、紧迫性），团队成员的特征（例如，成员多样性），以及工作环境的特征（例如，团队绩效是发生在虚拟环境中还是发生在协同定位环境中），以便识别交互记忆的哪个成分（或哪些交互）增加了团队绩效。 本研究具有一定的理论和实践意义。由于当今工作场所普遍存在快速的组织和技术变化，团队通常无法长时间保持在一起。 通过解开学习曲线效应的组成部分，我们学习如何更快地促进这些效应。相反，我们可以学会认识到时间无法替代的条件。

As team members gain experience working together, team performance improves significantly. These "learning curves" have been observed in many team settings, including software development teams, hospital surgery teams and coal-mining crews. This research project will examine constituents of team experience in order to learn more about the specific phenomena that underlie learning curve gains. Researchers have attributed some of the performance gains associated with team longevity to the development of "transactive memory" (TM) systems, which involve awareness of who knows and does what on a team. When a team has a well-defined TMS, team members know whom to rely on for specific skills or expertise. A series of laboratory studies will manipulate the match between team members' knowledge and roles and the extent to which team members share a common language. The experiments will examine the separate and interactive effects of these variables on team performance as well as the nature of the task (e.g., its uncertainty, urgency), characteristics of team members (e.g., member diversity), and features of the work context (e.g., whether team performance occurs in a virtual or co-located setting) in order to identify which component of transactive memory (or which interactions) increases team performance. This research has theoretical and practical implications. Due to the rapid organizational and technological changes prevalent in today's workplace, teams often do not not have the luxury of staying together for extended periods. By unpacking the constituents of learning curve effects we learn how to promote these effects more quickly. Conversely, we can learn to recognize the conditions in which there can be no substitute for time.