Contributions

  • Staats, Bradley R. - Contributor
  • Upton, David M., 1959- - Contributor
  • Harvard Business School - Contributor

Publication

2008 - Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts

Language

English

Word Count

8,500 words, Guess

Page Count

34 pages

Identifiers

Description

Much of the literature on team learning views experience as a unidimensional concept captured by the cumulative production volume or number of projects completed by a team. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that teams are stable in their membership and internal organization. In practice, however, such stability is rare, as the composition and structure of teams often changes over time or between projects. In this paper, we use detailed data from an Indian software services firm to examine how such changes may affect the accumulation of experience within, and the performance of, teams. We find that the level of team familiarity (i.e., the average number of times that each member has worked with every other member of the team) has a significant and positive effect on performance, but we observe that conventional measures of the experience of individual team members (e.g., years at the firm) are not consistently related to performance.

Description

Much of the literature on team learning views experience as a unidimensional concept captured by the cumulative production volume or number of projects completed by a team. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that teams are stable in their membership and internal organization. In practice, however, such stability is rare, as the composition and structure of teams often changes over time or between projects. In this paper, we use detailed data from an Indian software services firm to examine how such changes may affect the accumulation of experience within, and the performance of, teams. We find that the level of team familiarity (i.e., the average number of times that each member has worked with every other member of the team) has a significant and positive effect on performance, but we observe that conventional measures of the experience of individual team members (e.g., years at the firm) are not consistently related to performance. We do find, however, that the role experience of individuals in a team (i.e., years in a given role within a team) is associated with better team performance.

Subjects

Other Editions

  • Team familiarity, role experience, and performanceHarvard Business School2008

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