TY - JOUR

T1 - Attaining individual creativity and performance in multi-disciplinary and geographically-distributed it project teams

T2 - the role of transactive memory systems

AU - He, Wei

AU - Po-An Hsieh, J.J.

AU - Schroeder, Andreas

AU - Fang, Yulin

PY - 2022/6/1

Y1 - 2022/6/1

N2 - Contemporary IT project teams demand individual members to generate and implement novel ideas in response to the dynamic changes in IT and business requirements. Firms rely on multi-disciplinary, geographically-distributed IT project teams to gather necessary talents, regardless of their locations, for developing novel IT artifacts. In this team context, individuals are expected to leverage dissimilar others’ expertise for creating ideas during idea generation (IG) and then implement their ideas during idea implementation (II), known as the IGII process. Although much has been done to explain individual creativity, the extant literature offers little theoretical understanding on how to address the double-edged effects of dispersions in both functional expertise (ExpDisp) and geographical locations (GeoDiss)—the two defining characteristics of multi-disciplinary, cross-locational IT project teams—on individual creativity and subsequent performance. Drawing on the IGII framework, we propose transactive memory systems (TMSs) as a plausible team-level solution to tackle the challenge. With a multi-wave multi-level dataset from 141 members and their supervisors from 35 IT project teams, we found that team-level TMS and GeoDiss interactively moderate individual-level IGII processes in multi-disciplinary geographically -distributed IT project teams during both II and IG, but in qualitatively different ways.

AB - Contemporary IT project teams demand individual members to generate and implement novel ideas in response to the dynamic changes in IT and business requirements. Firms rely on multi-disciplinary, geographically-distributed IT project teams to gather necessary talents, regardless of their locations, for developing novel IT artifacts. In this team context, individuals are expected to leverage dissimilar others’ expertise for creating ideas during idea generation (IG) and then implement their ideas during idea implementation (II), known as the IGII process. Although much has been done to explain individual creativity, the extant literature offers little theoretical understanding on how to address the double-edged effects of dispersions in both functional expertise (ExpDisp) and geographical locations (GeoDiss)—the two defining characteristics of multi-disciplinary, cross-locational IT project teams—on individual creativity and subsequent performance. Drawing on the IGII framework, we propose transactive memory systems (TMSs) as a plausible team-level solution to tackle the challenge. With a multi-wave multi-level dataset from 141 members and their supervisors from 35 IT project teams, we found that team-level TMS and GeoDiss interactively moderate individual-level IGII processes in multi-disciplinary geographically -distributed IT project teams during both II and IG, but in qualitatively different ways.

KW - Expertise dissimilarity

KW - IT project teams

KW - geographic dispersion

KW - transactive memory system

KW - idea generation idea implementation

KW - cross-level analysis

KW - future work

KW - creativity

U2 - 10.25300/MISQ/2022/14596

DO - 10.25300/MISQ/2022/14596

M3 - Journal article

VL - 46

JO - MIS Quarterly

JF - MIS Quarterly

SN - 0276-7783

IS - 2

ER -