Virtual Workspace Technology Use and Knowledge-Sharing Effectiveness in Distributed Teams: The Influence of a Team’s Transactive Memory

We would like to thank the Society for Information Management, Netage, Kathy Chudoba, and Groove for helping us to identify the sample. We would also like to thank Samer Faraj, Sanjay Gosain, Arjan Raven and Sabine Hirt for providing comments that were helpful in revising this manuscript. We would also like to thank the members of our expert panel for providing us their invaluable insights regarding workspace technologies that helped guide our research. Abstract Firms are increasingly leveraging their globally distributed knowledge resources through deployment of distributed teams. Since face-to-face meetings are increasingly less common among distributed teams, team members are more frequently sharing their knowledge through the use of " virtual workspaces " – an integrated set of tools that offer a variety of communication support capabilities including a common team repository organized for easy search and retrieval, application sharing, electronic whiteboards and group discussion forums. Current literature suggests that group and contextual factors in general and a group's transactive memory in particular may shape how virtual workspaces are used to enhance the effectiveness of knowledge sharing within distributed teams. However, no empirical study has demonstrated the influence of transactive memory in shaping the relationship between virtual workspace usage and knowledge sharing effectiveness. Moreover, research on information technology support for distributed teams has not proposed theoretically-derived dimensions of communication support that can be provided by virtual workspaces. Based on common ground theory (Clark and Brennan 1991), we identify two dimensions of communication support required to create common ground among team members, as well as the role of transactive memory in influencing the value of each dimension in making knowledge sharing more effective. We studied 53 distributed teams and found that teams with low transactive memory reported higher satisfaction with the effectiveness of knowledge sharing in their teams when they used virtual workspace functionalities that facilitated multi-channel synchronous communication. Email and audio-conferencing were adequate for knowledge sharing in teams with highly developed transactive memory. For teams with moderate transactive memory, the two support dimensions appear to be complementary, such that using one dimension offers the same value as using both. Implications for theory and future research are discussed.