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Introduction
Talking to college recruiters, university placement offices and/or students themselves, nearly everyone agrees that professionals need to understand how to work with others and to be part of a team. However, if you ask managers about recent candidates they repeatedly indicate that graduates lack teamwork soft skills (Dishman, 2016). Teams and teamwork skills are necessary components of today’s business operations. Firms leverage the collective expertise of groups of individuals to better design, develop and transform business operations. Teams utilize a mix of knowledge that goes beyond individual members to solve complex problems and develop strategies that enable firms to adapt to changing environments. Both practitioners and academics want to understand how teams work and actually use knowledge contained within these units. To do so, many researchers study transactive memory systems (TMS), as they help explain how groups structure, process and share knowledge by clarifying how they jointly encode, store and retrieve relevant information (Wegner, 1987). To do so “group members divide the cognitive labor for their tasks, with members specializing in different domains” (Lewis, 2003, p. 587).
To explore teams and teamwork capabilities at the university level, we investigate the relationships between task conflict, personal conflict and TMS to illustrate how these constructs affect team performance of students as they utilize a popular operations management simulation tool. There has been much work seeking to understand how task and relationship conflict affect team dynamics (O’Neill et al., 2013) and intragroup work (De Wit et al., 2012). We focus on these conflict constructs since both have been shown to negatively affect teams and teamwork activities (Shaw et al., 2011). Understanding how the two constructs interact still needs further study. Thus, we frame this research using experiential learning theory and illustrate how teams encode, store, retrieve and communicate knowledge between the different knowledge domains (Brandon and Hollingshead, 2004). Leveraging this theoretical frame, we answer the following questions:
How does task conflict affect TMS?
How does relationship conflict mediate the linkage between task conflict and TMS?
How do TMS affect team performance?
Below, relevant literature including experiential learning theory is discussed as it relates to this study. This is followed by specific hypotheses and a description of how survey data were collected. In the analysis...