The Development of Transactive Memory: The Role of
Emotional Intelligence and Task Interdependence
Master Thesis, MSc HRM University of Groningen Facullty of Economic and Business
2008
Meta Bagus Amerossi
Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank drs Hanneke Gruterrink for her
constructive comments, commitment, and understanding during the
process of composing this thesis. It is a great honor for me to compose
my master thesis under her supervision. The author would also like to
thank Prof. dr. Gerben Van der Vegt as the second supervisor of this
thesis, Prof. dr. Basu Swastha Dharmmesta, Sari Winahjoe, MBA, and
Yulia Arisnani, MBA for providing this thesis sample, and also Aditya
Hernowo M.D., Tita Alissa M.Sc., Getty Tambunan M.Soc Sc., and
Schoolhomers for the constructive remarks. At last, the author also would
like to thank Paramita Sari, Ajda Bagus Missirumi, kel.Janti and
kel.Mekarsari for their outstanding support and commitment during the
Abstract
To build an effective teamwork, it is crucial for team members to be aware of who holds what expertise within the team. This ability is called Transactive Memory (TM). Many studies have confirmed the positive relation between TM and team performance, yet little is known about how a TM develops within team. Accordingly, in this study I argue that Emotional intelligence (Ei) and Task interdependence (Ti) would predict team TM development. To test these variables, 40 teams that consist of 5 graduate school students were used as the sample. The results were confirming that there is positive and significant relationship between individual Ei and team TM, and also confirming that there is positive and significant relationship between Ti and team TM. However, the presence of Ti that also suspected to moderate the relationship between Ei and team TM, were not supported in this study. Further, practical implications and future research suggestions were included in this study as well.
The Development of Transactive Memory: The Role of Emotional Intelligence and Task Interdependence
To win the current fierce economic competition, organizations resort more and more to teamwork. Examples of such teams are consulting teams, product development teams and cross-functional teams. For effective teamwork, team members must use the heterogeneity of expertise of different team members. These factors may result in problem solutions or innovative products that are the ultimate goals of organizations (Lewis, 2003). When teams perform well, this will also improve the organizational performance. However, unfortunately many teams perform less well than one would expect based on the collective expertise of the team members.
Ei is an individual’s capability of understanding his or her emotions as well as those of others, which could be used to control an individual‘s own emotions and at the same time other individuals’ emotions (Salovey and Mayer, 1990). Emotion is defined as a tendency of an adaptive behavior and physical response from an individual toward the situation they face (Gross, 1998). Wong and Law (2002) suggested that because emotions are tendencies and may be modulated, they could be regulated and managed as well. Emotionally smart individual are usually calm and confident in controlling himself or herself, as a result of high self-control of emotion. Therefore, others would believe that emotionally smart people could control others’ emotion as well. For example, research on leadership suggests that emotional intelligent leaders are more effective than less emotionally intelligent leaders because they are able to control their team members and building strong emotional relationship simultaneously (Goleman, Boyatzis, and McKee, 2002). Emotionally intelligent individuals seem to understand their own skills and capabilities better and also seem to be more prone in recognizing emotions and qualities of others. Therefore, I would argue that emotional intelligence may help team members recognize their own skills and capabilities as well as those of others. This will enhance team members’ knowledge of ‘who knows what’ and thus improving the transactive memory.
transactive memory, because these people have to work together instead of alone (Zhang et al., 2007). Task interdependence is the degree to which an individual needs another individual’s information etc support regarding the accomplishment of his or her job (Van der Vegt, Van de Vliert, and Oosterhof, 2003).
This research investigates the relationship between team transactive memory, emotional intelligence and task interdependence in 40 teams of 5 graduate students from the Faculty of Economics and Business Gadjahmada University in Indonesia. These teams had to work together for 6 months in order to accomplish a marketing research project regarding the new product launching for a niche market.
Theoretical Backgrounds and Hypotheses
Transactive Memory and Emotional Intelligence
Wegner, Giuliano, and Hertel, (1985) introduced the concept of TM, which allows one to use another individual memory system to extend his/her knowledge. TM is a system for encoding, storing and retrieving information in a group of people (Wegner, 1986; Wegner et al., 1985). In other words, an individual becomes the external memory aid of other individuals (Engestrom, Brown, Engestrom, and Koistinen, 1990; Norman, 1988; Harris, 1978).
period of time, are more aware of who is responsible for what knowledge and thus have a better TM that helps them perform better on such memory tasks. TM consists of three components “specialization, credibility, and coordination behaviors” (e.g., Moreland and Myaskovsky, 2000; Liang et al., 1995). Lewis (2004) revealed that initially distributed expertise and familiar members would likely develop TM. Zhang et al., (2007) suggested that TM would allow team members to understand which one of them has the specialized knowledge (specialization), how to build trust towards this knowledge trustworthiness (credibility), and how to organize this knowledge differentiation effectively (coordination). Furthermore, Zhang et al. also suggested that in an established transactive memory, team members could enhance their capabilities by using each other’s resources effectively and creating a system of “knowledge-holding” which would lead to better team performance.
We argue that EI is very important in learning ‘who knows what’ within a team. Salovey and Mayer (1990) defined Ei as the representation of an individual’s ability in dealing with his or hers as well as others’ emotions which involves monitoring, differentiating, and using it in guiding one’s thinking and action. Furthermore, Salovey and Mayer subdivided Ei into four distinct dimensions:
self-emotional appraisal (SEA), others’ self-emotional appraisal (OEA), regulation of emotion (ROE), and use of emotion (UOE). Thus, appraising one’s emotion is
has a disagreement with their fellow team members, for example, then he/she should calm down as quickly as possible to prevent this from affecting team relationships. In this way, the team will maintain a psychologically safe team environment (Edmonson, 1999).
Second, an individual with the ability to direct their emotions can use their energy for constructive activities, such as helping fellow members when they face difficulties. It is important for an individual to perceive and understand other’s emotions. For example, a team member who is highly sensitive to their fellow member feelings will notice when someone is having problems or facing difficulties and may offer help to overcome this member’s problems. The interaction between these individuals will enhance the possibility of learning about another individual expertise. This may be the reason why TM develops rapidly in teams that consist of emotional intelligent individuals.
Transactive Memory and Task Interdependence
Task interdependence is defined as the interdependence between team members within the team in regards to achieve desired team ouput or performance by sharing materials, information, or expertise (Cummings, 1978). TM theory states that in order to develop TM within a team, every team member needs to interact intensively by means of face-to-face communication between each other (Lewis, 2004). Team members who are highly task interdependent will interact more intensively than members who are less task interdependent. When a team member faced difficulties in accomplishing his/her part of the team task, then he/she should ask their fellow members for help in order to accomplish the task without raising any difficulties for fellow members and team (Van der Vegt et al., 2003). As a result, every team member will learn to understand the skills of their fellow members, developing TM between team members.
Accordingly, my hypothesis states that higher levels of Ti within the member of the team will lead to a better team TM.
H2: Task interdependence between team members is positively related to the team TM.
Transactive Memory, Emotional Intelligence, and Task Interdependence
According to aforementioned explanation, emotionally smart individual will be able to control their own emotion if they face unpleasant situation (i.e., having disagreement with their fellow member) regarding to their task working agreement. As a result of this ability, this individual will be able to understand their fellow member better (i.e., knowing who knows what within the team member) because the presence of Ti. The presence of Ti will increase the communication and interaction between team members and will increase team TM because intensive communication and interaction between team member will increases ‘who knows what’ within the team member. Thus, Ti will manage the relationship within team members in order to develop team TM.
problems. However, I expect that this will especially be the case when team members are dependent from one another with regard to the accomplishment of their tasks. When Ti increases, team members would involved in high frequent of communication between each other because the increasing of Ti would increase the helping behavior within team members. Accordingly, the dependency within team members would increase along with the increase of team Ti because people will learn about the knowledge, skill, and ability of the team member. This kind of situation leads to the development of TM. In other words, higher Ti would strengthen the relationship between individual Ei and team TM. Therefore, my third hypothesis is:
H3: Task interdependence will moderate the relation between Ei and team TM in the sense that this relation will be more positive when Ti increases.
Figure 1. Conceptual Model of the Relationship between Emotional Intelligence, Task Interdependence, and Team Transactive Memory.
Method
Sample and Procedure
We tested the hypotheses in a survey study among 200 participants in various class of master in marketing program study. These classes aimed to teach individuals a great knowledge of marketing while simultaneously encouraging them to become professional entrepreneurs. All of these classes were designed to conduct a good marketing research project. Students worked together in 40 five-person groups that had to launch a new product through several steps. These steps were generating ideas, assembling concepts, testing the concept that assembled earlier, building prototype, testing prototype, formulating marketing strategy, testing the marketing strategy built previously, conducting a business feasibility study and commercialization (launching the product to the market). In order to complete the course, each team had to accomplish each of these steps. These participants had been working together in their team for at least five months prior to this study. This makes them suitable for our objective, because they had already been engaged in intensive interaction and communication to accomplish their team tasks. Moreover, this resembles the reality of how individuals with various backgrounds in organizations work together and adapt to their environments in order to build a good and marketable product.
still incorporates theoretical and practical considerations (Hair, Black, Babin, Anderson, Tatham, 2006). Accordingly, the questionnaire was valid linguistically before the distribution process begins.
Classes that participated in this study were at the same level of education (Master Programs). The Marketing Research class consisted of 70 pupils, who were divided into 14 teams. The Consumer Behaviour class consisted of 50 pupils who were divided into 10 teams. The class of Advance Marketing Strategy consisted of 50 pupils who were divided into 10 teams, and the class of Global Marketing consisting of 30 pupils who were divided into 6 teams.
Further, the students involved in this study were all students of marketing course classes that were designed to work in teams in order to accomplish the course. 90% of the tasks were addressed as team task instead such as conducting market field trips to generate ideas about a product that did not yet exist in the market, transforming these ideas into a piece of product prototype, oversee whether this prototype would be accepted by their consumer sample and whether it would not violate the law, conducting small applied marketing research to provide an empirical basis to promote and sell this product widely, testing their marketing strategy in the real market and also selling the product directly to their targeted market. All of the teams that participated in this study were given a set of compiled paper-based questionnaires that consists of a total of 36 items. All these teams filled in the questionnaire together at the same time.
participants, the mean of the age was 25 years old (from 21 to 40 years old). Out of 54.1% (N=106) participants were female, and 45.9% (N=90) were male.
Measures.
Emotional intelligence was measured with 16 items from an existing scale
(Wong and Law, 2002). The example of the items were “I have a good sense of why I have certain feelings most of the time”, “I have good understanding of my own emotions” that represented the SEA dimension, “I always know my friends’ emotions from their behavior”, “I am a good observer of other’s emotions that represented the OEA dimension, “I always set goals for myself and then try my best to achieve them”, “I always tell myself I am a competent person” that represented the UOE dimension, and “I am able to control my temper and handle difficulties rationally, “I am quite capable of controlling my own emotions” that represented the ROE dimension. The Cronbach’s Alpha for this scale was .79.
Transactive memory was measured with a 15-item scale from Lewis (2003).
This scale consisted of three subdimensions, specialization, credibility and coordination. Example items for these three dimensions were: “Each of the team members has specialized knowledge of some aspect of our project”, “I was comfortable accepting procedural suggestions from other team members”, and “Our team worked together in a well-coordinated fashion”. Cronbach’s Alpha for this scale was .55.
Task interdependence was measured with 5 items from Van der Vegt et al.,
Control variables. Because the ages of the participants sampled in this study
could have influenced to the maturity of the response, it was necessary to control for this effect. According to (Albanese et al., 1990) in Tucker et al., (2000), older participants (i.e., high age) tend to be emotionally smart.
Data Analysis
This study has tested 3 hypotheses. A hierarchical linier regression with three steps was used in order to predict the main and interaction effect on team TM (Cooper and Schindler, 2006; Field, 2005; Hair et al., 2006). The control variable was included in the first step. The predictors of this study, which were Ei and Ti, were included in the second step. The interaction variable of Ei and Ti was included in the third step. Before the regression analysis was used, I standardized all independent variables in order to reached easily comparable results (Field, 2005).
Results
Preliminary Analysis
TABLE 1
Means, Standard Deviations, and Correlations
No Variables Mean SD 1 2 3 1 TMS 3.615 .304 2 Age 25.188 3.498 .115 3 Ei 3.892 .411 .310* -.027 4 Ti 2.964 .623 .195* -.115 -.030 N=196 *P < .001
Testing the hypotheses. Table 2 displays the results of the hierarchical regression analysis. In the first step, with only the control variable age was significant (ΔR2=
.013, ΔF= 2.583, n.s.). The second step with the independent variables contributed significantly to the prediction of TM (ΔR2= .135, ΔF= 15.149, p<.001). In contrast to
our expectation, the third step with the interaction variable was not significant (ΔR2=
.001, ΔF=.114, n.s.).
Hypothesis 1 stated that Ei is positively related to the team’s TM. The analysis shows that this relationship was positive (b = .097, t = 4.772, p<.001). This means that Ei increases team TM, confirming hypothesis 1.
My second hypothesis stated that Ti is positively related to the team’s TM. The results showed that this relationship was positive as expected (b = .059, t = 4.772, p<.005). This means that the more team members are task interdependent, the better TM. Hypothesis 2 was thus confirmed.
positive as Ti increases. However, the results showed no interaction effect (b = -.006, t = -.337, p = n.s.). Hypothesis 3 was thus not confirmed.
TABLE 2
Hierarchical Linear Regression of Transactive Memory on Emotional Intelligence and Task Interdependence. Team TMS Step Variables 1 2 3 1 Age .035 .031 .031 2 Emotional intelligence Task interdependence .097* .059* .098* .060* 3 Interaction -.006 R2 R2 Change .013 .013 .148 .135 .148 .001 *p<.001
Discussion and Conclusion
This study aims to investigate the relationship between individual Ei and the presence of Ti within team member on the development of team’s TM. The first two hypotheses are confirmed by the findings, which suggest that Ei and Ti are positively related to the team’s TM. However, the results indicate that the interaction hypothesis was not supported. Further, following section will discuss these findings.
successfully would increase, individually as a person and collectively as a part of the team. This behavior was known as people’s TM (Wegner et al., 1991). There are many ways to develop team TM. Among that many ways, individual that emotionally smart along with task interdependence within team member is able to develop team TM.
The first confirmed hypothesis suggests that individual Ei increases team TM. This means that team composition consisting of emotionally smart individual will develop team TM. This type of individual (i.e., emotionally smart ones) will understand their fellow team member better in regards to ‘who knows what’ within the team member. Further, emotionally smart individual will be able to understand other individual better than less emotionally smart because they are able to understand and control his or her own emotion, also understand and control other individual emotion as well. This kind of individual ability was known as emotional intelligence (Salovey and Mayer, 1990). Accordingly, team that consists of emotionally smart individual will understand their team member better and vice versa. As a result, emotionally smart individual does increase team TM.
information, or expertise). Therefore, the second hypothesis, which suggests that the presence of Ti also increases team TM, was also confirmed.
The findings in this study are consistent with Transactive Memory theory (Wegner et al., 1985) and, for example, Wegner et al., (1991) findings that natural pairs built a TM over time. This study also confirms Lewis’s (2004) statement, that in order to develop a TM people should have intensive interaction and communication, especially face-to-face and regularly. Task interdependence seems one way to increase interaction and communication between team members.
A second reason that I did not find the expected interaction may be because this interaction is a third variable. For example, the research from Zhang et al., (2007) also revealed that Ti along with cooperative goal and support for innovation are related to the team’s TM and lead to a better team performance. Accordingly, the expected interaction may be will only occur when team members were not only having task interdependence, but also having goal interdependence as well. Van der Vegt et al. (2001) suggests that the combination of high level of goal interdependence with high level of task interdependence has positive relation with job and team satisfaction. Thus, it seems that the interaction of Ei and Ti alone does not predict team TM. This study finding then suggests that Ti should be measured together with goal interdependence, instead of Ti alone, to predict team TM better.
Limitations and Future Research
the classes for data collection process. Accordingly, these study results cannot be generalized further. In order to have generalized results, this study should be replicated in the field research setting because it comprehends the real world team activities that may not be occur in this study research setting (i.e., high level of task and goal interdependence).
The next, this study was only designed as a cross-sectional study instead of a longitudinal study. This limitation makes it impossible to infer causality (Van der Vegt et al., 2003). To overcome this limitation, future research should be designed as longitudinal study by conducting multiple data collection process in specific times (e.g., one time during the first team discussion and the second time during the last team discussion). Accordingly, this multiple data collection process could predict better results and also infer causality, hypothetically.
The next limitation of this study is that this study only uses two predictors that were suspected to be able to develop the team’s TM. Therefore, future studies could add new variables that may affect the development of team’s TM.
Practical Implication
Conlusion
This study has shown that teams with emotionally smart individuals and teams in which the members are highly task interdependent develop better transactive memories. This study underlines the importance of EI in teams and provides a basis for both practitioners and scientists for future research on the antecedents of TM and to develop practical implications based on that.
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