Learning in Temporary Teams: The Varying Effects of Partner Exposure by Team Member Role

Song-Hee Kim (), Hummy Song () and Melissa A. Valentine ()
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Song-Hee Kim: SNU Business School, Seoul National University, Seoul 08826, South Korea
Hummy Song: The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104
Melissa A. Valentine: Department of Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305

Organization Science, 2023, vol. 34, issue 1, 433-455

Abstract: In many workplaces, temporary teams convene to coordinate complex work, despite team members having not worked together before. Most related research has found consistent performance benefits when members of temporary teams work together multiple times ( team familiarity ). Recent work in this area broke new conceptual ground by instead exploring the learning and performance benefits that team members gain by being exposed to many new partners ( partner exposure ). In contrast to that new work that examined partner exposure between team members who are peers, in this paper, we extend this research by developing and testing theory about the performance effects of partner exposure for team members whose roles are differentiated by authority and skill. We use visit-level data from a hospital emergency department and leverage the ad hoc assignment of attendings, nurses, and residents to teams and the round-robin assignment of patients to these teams as our identification strategy. We find a negative performance effect of both nurses’ and resident trainees’ partner exposure to more attendings and of attendings’ and nurses’ exposure to more residents. In contrast, both attendings and residents experience a positive impact on performance from working with more nurses. The respective effects of residents working with more attendings and with more nurses is attenuated on patient cases with more structured workflows. Our results suggest that interactions with team members in decision-executing roles, as opposed to decision-initiating roles, is an important but often unrecognized part of disciplinary training and team learning.

Keywords: temporary teams; partner exposure; team familiarity; hierarchy; healthcare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ororsc:v:34:y:2023:i:1:p:433-455

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