In contemporary organizations, teams are essential for addressing complex, interdependent tasks, requiring members to recognize one another's expertise, define role-specific specializations, and integrate knowledge swiftly to meet task demands. A transactive memory system (TMS), as a form of team-level meta-cognition, enables the encoding, storage, and retrieval of diverse knowledge through a cooperative division of cognitive labor. Drawing on the motivated information processing in group model, this study positions TMS as a mediator linking team cognitive complexity (epistemic motivation) and team psychological safety climate (social motivation) to team creativity, while examining team time pressure as a moderator between TMS and creativity. Data were collected longitudinally from 53 functional teams (53 leaders and 312-332 members) in a large Taiwanese pharmaceutical organization across three waves: Time 1 measured cognitive complexity, team affect, and task interdependence; Time 2 (two weeks later) assessed psychological safety climate, TMS, and perceived time pressure; and Time 3 (two months later) involved leader-rated creativity. Path analyses were conducted in Mplus with 5,000 bootstrap resamples, controlling for task interdependence and team affect.
Results indicated that psychological safety climate significantly and negatively moderated the positive association between team cognitive complexity and TMS, and that time pressure significantly and negatively moderated the positive association between TMS and creativity. These findings provide empirical support for the team motivated information processing model and extend the external validity of TMS research by demonstrating its contingent effects under varying social and temporal conditions. The study highlights the importance of considering both cognitive and social motivational factors in shaping TMS and warns of the potential adverse effects of high time pressure on translating shared cognitive structures into creative outcomes.