The Catalyst Effect: The Impact of Transactive Memory System Structure on Team Performance
研究了交互记忆系统中元知识分布结构（集中式与分散式）对团队绩效的影响，发现集中式结构可通过促进信息交换与整合产生催化剂效应，且该效应取决于任务信息分布带来的协调需求。
Research on transactive memory systems (TMSs) implicitly assumes that metaknowledge (i.e., the “knowledge of who knows what”) is uniformly distributed among team members. Relaxing this assumption results in a more realistic notion of team cognition in which the distribution of metaknowledge can take different forms. Demonstrating the importance of this conceptual shift, we compare teams in which metaknowledge is concentrated within one central member (a centralized TMS structure) with teams in which metaknowledge is distributed evenly among the members (a decentralized TMS structure). We predict that centralized metaknowledge can give teams a performance advantage over decentralized metaknowledge, because centralized metaknowledge can allow the central member to function as a catalyst for information exchange and integration. We propose this catalyst effect to be contingent on the extent to which the distribution of task information among members poses high coordination demands to effectively integrate members' knowledge. In a laboratory team decision-making experiment (n = 112), we found the predicted interaction effect between TMS structure and the distribution of task information. Furthermore, the experiment supported our hypotheses about the mediating role of the transactive retrieval process and the ensuing team information elaboration.