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Introduction
Interest in team innovation has accelerated during the last three decades in line with increasing reliance on and recognition of teams as the drivers of organizational innovation (see Bledow et al. , 2009; Hülsheger et al ., 2009, for reviews). Team innovation refers to "the intentional introduction and application, within a role, group or organization of ideas, processes, products or procedures, new to the relevant unit of adoption, designed to significantly benefit the individual, the group, the organization or wider society" (West and Farr, 1990, p. 9).
Team innovation scholars often assume that a heterogeneous membership provides teams with diverse task-related information and that certain team processes or emergent states facilitate the exchange of such information (Sung and Choi, 2012). Among various theories describing how teams use diverse information in performing their tasks, transactive memory systems (TMS) theory (Wegner, 1986) has attracted increasing scholarly attention (see Peltokorpi, 2008; Ren and Argote, 2011, for reviews). TMS can be described as a set of diverse task information held by different team members combined with a shared awareness of "who knows what" within the team. In efficient TMS, team members are aware who possesses what specialized task information (i.e. specialization), trust the credibility of that information (i.e. credibility) and organize this information efficiently (i.e. coordination) (Lewis, 2003). In TMS, information differentiation starts to increase once each member accepts different task domain expert responsibility and other team members recognize them as experts and start to rely on their expertise. While the above-mentioned TMS processes are increasingly argued to facilitate team innovation (Peltokorpi, 2008; Wegner, 1986; Zhu, 2009) and team creativity[1] (Gino et al. , 2010; Ren and Argote, 2011), direct empirical support is still scarce.
This study, by examining the effect of TMS on research team innovation, contributes to TMS research in three ways. First, despite their alleged existence in and importance to knowledge-intensive teams (Lewis, 2003), to the best of our knowledge, no previous study has directly linked TMS on innovation in organizational teams. While providing important early evidence, previous studies linking TMS on team creativity in student groups (Gino et al. , 2010) and team innovation in school boards (Zhu, 2009) differ from research teams explicitly formed to produce innovations (Bain et al. , 2001)....