ABSTRACT
Working in groups can be difficult. Group members must decide who knows what, coordinate who will do what, share knowledge, and accomplish their individual and collective tasks. Research indicates that groups do not often handle these tasks as well as they should, and, as a result, almost always perform worse than expected based on the sum of members’ individual knowledge and abilities (Hastie, 1986). Groups composed of people who know each other well or who have worked together in the past often work together better than comparable groups of strangers (Hollingshead, 1998a, 1998b; Liang, Moreland, & Argote, 1995). One explanation for why group performance improves over time is that experienced groups develop a transactive memory that enables them to make better use of each individual’s expertise (Liang et al., 1995.) Transactive memory systems (TMS) theory, a theory of group-level cognition, explains how people in collectives learn, store, use, and coordinate their knowledge to accomplish individual, group, and organizational goals (Hollingshead, 2010). It is a theory about how people in relationships, groups, and organizations learn “who knows what ” and use that knowledge to decide “who will do what,” resulting in more efficient and effective individual and collective performance. Cognitive interdependence and the norm of reciprocity drive the creation of transactive memory – each member takes responsibility for different knowledge areas, and members rely on one another for information outside of their responsibility. Although experienced groups often share knowledge more effectively and perform better than newly formed groups because of their more developed transactive memory system, they still rarely achieve their theoretical maximum (Hastie, 1986). This chapter investigates why this might be the case, and what groups can do to improve their knowledge sharing among members. It explores sources, processes, and outcomes of knowledge-sharing problems through the theoretical lens of transactive memory theory. We will present a conceptual framework for understanding knowledge-sharing errors in groups, and investigate the role of communication in creating, correcting, and reinforcing errors.
