Social Media Affordances and Transactive Memory Systems in Virtual Teams

Recent advances in social media technologies offer a variety of tools for virtual teams to share knowledge among their team members and develop transactive memory systems (TMS). Adopting the media affordances lens, the current study investigates how social media affordances affect individual evaluations of TMS development and perceived team effectiveness in virtual teams. Survey data from 339 virtual team members across 92 hackathon events reveal that types of affordances have differing impacts on each of the three dimensions of TMS (perceptions of accuracy, sharedness, and validation). Furthermore, each dimension of perceived TMS mediates the relationship between its related social media affordance types and perceived team effectiveness. These findings suggest that virtual teams may need to adopt different social media technologies depending on which aspect of TMS development is prioritized.