• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.137-166
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• 2010

A virtual team is defined a group of people that use electronic communications for some or all of their interactions with other team members. Because team members of a virtual team are physically and temporally distributed, a team's transactive memory system(TMS) is considered to be crucial for the team's effectiveness and performance. TMS refers to a set of individual memory systems which integrate knowledge possessed by particular members through a shared awareness of who knows what. This paper seeks to understand (1) how a virtual team's TMS influences team performance, and (2) what factors contribute to developing the team's TMS. Given these purposes, through the extensive literature review, we first identified components and antecedents to develop a theoretical model that predicts a virtual team's performance. Using the survey data gathered from 172 virtual teams, this study found that expertise location, coordination, and cognition-based trust which were proposed as three components of TMS positively influenced a virtual team's performance. Furthermore, this study uncovered that perceived media richness, network tie strength, and shared norms significantly influenced the components of TMS, while geographical dispersion did not exert any significant influence on TMS.