Learning from Many: Partner Exposure and Team Familiarity in Fluid Teams
In services where teams come together for short collaborations, managers are often advised to strive for high team familiarity so as to improve coordination and consequently, performance. However, inducing high team familiarity by keeping team membership intact can limit workers’ opportunities to ac...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
2021
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/130399 |
| _version_ | 1811072055045521408 |
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| author | Jonasson, Jonas Oddur |
| author2 | Sloan School of Management |
| author_facet | Sloan School of Management Jonasson, Jonas Oddur |
| author_sort | Jonasson, Jonas Oddur |
| collection | MIT |
| description | In services where teams come together for short collaborations, managers are often advised to strive for high team familiarity so as to improve coordination and consequently, performance. However, inducing high team familiarity by keeping team membership intact can limit workers’ opportunities to acquire useful knowledge and alternative practices from exposure to a broader set of partners. We introduce an empirical measure for prior partner exposure and estimate its impact (along with that of team familiarity) on operational performance using data from the London Ambulance Service. Our analysis focuses on ambulance transports involving new paramedic recruits, where exogenous changes in team membership enable identification of the performance effect. Specifically, we investigate the impact of prior partner exposure on time spent during patient pickup at the scene and patient handover at the hospital. We find that the effect varies with the process characteristics. For the patient pickup process, which is less standardized, greater partner exposure directly improves performance. For the more standardized patient handover process, this beneficial effect is triggered beyond a threshold of sufficient individual experience. In addition, we find some evidence that this beneficial performance impact of prior partner exposure is amplified during periods of high workload, particularly for the patient handover process. Finally, a counterfactual analysis based on our estimates shows that a team formation strategy emphasizing partner exposure outperforms one that emphasizes team familiarity by about 9.2% in our empirical context. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T09:00:10Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/130399 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T09:00:10Z |
| publishDate | 2021 |
| publisher | Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1303992022-09-26T09:46:23Z Learning from Many: Partner Exposure and Team Familiarity in Fluid Teams Jonasson, Jonas Oddur Sloan School of Management In services where teams come together for short collaborations, managers are often advised to strive for high team familiarity so as to improve coordination and consequently, performance. However, inducing high team familiarity by keeping team membership intact can limit workers’ opportunities to acquire useful knowledge and alternative practices from exposure to a broader set of partners. We introduce an empirical measure for prior partner exposure and estimate its impact (along with that of team familiarity) on operational performance using data from the London Ambulance Service. Our analysis focuses on ambulance transports involving new paramedic recruits, where exogenous changes in team membership enable identification of the performance effect. Specifically, we investigate the impact of prior partner exposure on time spent during patient pickup at the scene and patient handover at the hospital. We find that the effect varies with the process characteristics. For the patient pickup process, which is less standardized, greater partner exposure directly improves performance. For the more standardized patient handover process, this beneficial effect is triggered beyond a threshold of sufficient individual experience. In addition, we find some evidence that this beneficial performance impact of prior partner exposure is amplified during periods of high workload, particularly for the patient handover process. Finally, a counterfactual analysis based on our estimates shows that a team formation strategy emphasizing partner exposure outperforms one that emphasizes team familiarity by about 9.2% in our empirical context. 2021-04-07T13:30:38Z 2021-04-07T13:30:38Z 2020-06 2019-03 2021-04-07T12:22:29Z Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle 0025-1909 https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/130399 Ak ̧sin, Zeynep et al. “Learning from Many: Partner Exposure and Team Familiarity in Fluid Teams.” Management Science, 67, 2 (June 2020) © 2020 The Author(s) en 10.1287/MNSC.2019.3576 Management Science Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ application/pdf Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) SSRN |
| spellingShingle | Jonasson, Jonas Oddur Learning from Many: Partner Exposure and Team Familiarity in Fluid Teams |
| title | Learning from Many: Partner Exposure and Team Familiarity in Fluid Teams |
| title_full | Learning from Many: Partner Exposure and Team Familiarity in Fluid Teams |
| title_fullStr | Learning from Many: Partner Exposure and Team Familiarity in Fluid Teams |
| title_full_unstemmed | Learning from Many: Partner Exposure and Team Familiarity in Fluid Teams |
| title_short | Learning from Many: Partner Exposure and Team Familiarity in Fluid Teams |
| title_sort | learning from many partner exposure and team familiarity in fluid teams |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/130399 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT jonassonjonasoddur learningfrommanypartnerexposureandteamfamiliarityinfluidteams |