Team formation with complementary skills

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Buyukboyaci M. İ., Robbett A.

JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS & MANAGEMENT STRATEGY, vol.28, no.4, pp.713-733, 2019 (SSCI) identifier identifier

  • Publication Type: Article / Article
  • Volume: 28 Issue: 4
  • Publication Date: 2019
  • Doi Number: 10.1111/jems.12296
  • Journal Name: JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS & MANAGEMENT STRATEGY
  • Journal Indexes: Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Scopus
  • Page Numbers: pp.713-733
  • Keywords: comparative advantage, contest, endogenous team formation, matching, team performance, weakest-link technology, REAL EFFORT, COMMUNICATION, COORDINATION, COOPERATION, INCENTIVES
  • Middle East Technical University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

One explanation for the prevalence of self-managed work teams is that they enable workers with complementary skills to specialize in the tasks they do best, a benefit that may be enhanced if workers can sort themselves into teams. To assess this explanation, we design a real-effort experiment to study the endogenous formation of teams, and its effect on productivity, when specialization either is or is not feasible. We find a strong positive interaction between endogenous team formation and the ability to specialize, indicating that endogenous team formation is a particularly effective mechanism for promoting team output in production environments that enable the exploitation of skill complementarities.