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Team formation with complementary skills
Author(s) -
Büyükboyaci Mürüvvet,
Robbett Andrea
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
journal of economics and management strategy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.672
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1530-9134
pISSN - 1058-6407
DOI - 10.1111/jems.12296
Subject(s) - sort , productivity , production (economics) , mechanism (biology) , knowledge management , work (physics) , team development , business , psychology , process management , computer science , microeconomics , economics , engineering , mechanical engineering , philosophy , epistemology , information retrieval , macroeconomics
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.