Team formation with complementary skills
JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS & MANAGEMENT STRATEGY, vol.28, no.4, pp.713-733, 2019 (SSCI, Scopus)
- 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
- Open Archive Collection: AVESIS Open Access Collection
- 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.