Impact of Project Transactive Memory System on Project Team Resilience Through Shared Leadership

Abstract

As the business environments become more dynamic, projects have grown more complex and adversity may be inevitable in most project contexts. Navigating the unforeseen can put project teams under immense amounts of pressure and may trigger decline in teams' perfonnance and inadve1iently jeopardize the project itself. Therefore, project team's resilience to withstand crises, setbacks and disruptions, has become a subject of interest. Despite growing interest, the mechanisms that underlie emergence of project team resilience are not well understood. In order to address this dearth of knowledge, the present study aims to explore the relationship between project team transactive memory systems as key determinant of project team resilience in the context of Pakistan's IT industry. In light of conservation of resources theory, this study proposed and tested a moderated mediation model, by examining mediating role of shared leadership and moderating role of environmental turbulence on the relationship between project transactive memory systems and project team resilience. A 33 item survey was used to collect response from 179 project team members. structural equation modelling was employed to test the predictive power of the model. Results indicated that strength of project transactive memory systems is positively associated with emergence of shared leadership behavior, which in turn lead to emergence of project team resilience. Although this association was contingent upon environmental turbulence which had a dampening effect. Upon further analysis it was found that environmental turbulence had a significant conditional indirect effect upon the P-TMS dimension of credibility, whereas, the dimensions of specialization and coordination were not found to be significantly impacted by environmental turbulence.