Team formation with complementary skills

Muruvvet Buyukboyaci and Andrea Robbett

Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, 2019, vol. 28, issue 4, 713-733

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.

Date: 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1111/jems.12296

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