Variation in experience and team familiarity

Description

In settings ranging from product development to service delivery, fluid teams of individuals with different sets of experience are tasked with projects that are critical to their organization's success. Although building teams from individuals with different prior experience is increasingly necessary, prior work examining the relationship between experience and performance fails to find a consistent effect of variation in experience on performance. We hypothesize that team familiarity - team members' prior experience working with one another - is one mechanism that helps teams leverage the potential benefits of variation in team member experience by alleviating coordination problems that such variation may create. In team familiarity, our paper identifies one mechanism for capturing the performance benefits of variation in experience and provides insight into how the broader management of experience accumulation affects team performance.

Description

Prior work in organizational learning has failed to find a consistent effect of variation in experience on performance. While some studies find a positive relationship between these two variables, others find no effect or even a negative relationship. In this paper, we suggest that the differences in prior findings may be due to the failure to separate the processes of knowledge acquisition and knowledge application. While variation in experience may permit the acquisition of valuable knowledge, additional mechanisms may be necessary to enable the subsequent application of that knowledge in a team setting. We hypothesize that team familiarity - prior experience working with team members - may be such a mechanism. We use detailed project- and individual-level data from an Indian software services firm to examine the effects of team familiarity and variation in market experience on multiple measures of performance for over 1,100 software development projects Consistent with prior work, we find mixed results for the effect of variation in experience on performance. We do, however, see evidence of a moderating effect of team familiarity on the relationship between these two variables. Our paper identifies one mechanism for uniting knowledge acquisition and knowledge application and provides insight into how the management of experience accumulation affects the development of organizational capabilities.

Subjects

Series Statement

• Working paper / Harvard Business School -- 09-035

Other Editions

• Variation in experience and team familiarity: addressing the knowledge acquisition-application problemHarvard Business School2008-01-01
• Variation in experience and team familiarityHarvard Business School2009-01-01