Contemporary IT project teams demand that individual members generate and implement novel ideas in
response to the dynamic changes in IT and business requirements. Firms rely on multidisciplinary,
geographically distributed IT project teams to gather the necessary talent, regardless of their locations,
for developing novel IT artifacts. In this team context, individuals are expected to leverage dissimilar
others’ expertise for creating ideas during idea generation (IG) and then implement their ideas during
idea implementation (II), known as the IGII process. Although much has been done to explain individual
creativity, the extant literature offers little theoretical understanding on how to address the double-edged
effects of dispersions in both functional expertise (ExpDisp) and geographical locations (GeoDiss)—the
two defining characteristics of multi-disciplinary, cross-locational IT project teams—on individual
creativity and subsequent performance. Drawing on the IGII framework, we propose transactive memory
systems (TMSs) as a plausible team-level solution to tackle the challenge. With a multi-wave multi-level
dataset from 141 members and their supervisors from 35 IT project teams, we found that team-level TMS
and GeoDiss interactively moderate individual-level IGII processes in multi-disciplinary geographically
-distributed IT project teams during both II and IG, but in qualitatively different ways.
June 2022
MIS Quarterly