"No Man Is an Island": An Empirical Study on Team Formation and Performance

Alessandra Allocca ()

CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series from University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany

Abstract: Many organizations rely on decentralized arrangements where employees choose their projects and teams. Most of the empirical literature on working collaborations instead focuses on teams that are exogenously formed. I develop a structural entry model with heterogeneous strategic interactions where agents decide whether to join a project. The decision depends on who else may potentially join the project, the project quality, as well as other individual and project characteristics. In turn, this decision affects the probability of project completion. I estimate the model using a novel dataset from an important scientific collaboration. I find that agents' decisions to select into projects highly depend on the pool of teammates and the size of the team whereas projects' quality is of lesser importance. Heterogeneity in agents' characteristics explains this selection, which needs to be accounted for to obtain unbiased estimates of teams' performance. With a counterfactual experiment, I show that moving from a decentralized to a centralized arrangement leads to fewer completed projects.

Keywords: Teamwork; Entry Game; Innovation; Personnel Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C57 C72 L2 M50 O32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44
Date: 2020-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-hrm, nep-lma, nep-ore and nep-ppm
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.crctr224.de/research/discussion-papers/archive/dp174

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2020_174

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series from University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany Kaiserstr. 1, 53113 Bonn , Germany.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CRC Office ().