Role Selection and Team Performance

David Cooper () and Matthias Sutter

No 5892, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Team success relies on assigning team members to the right tasks. We use controlled experiments to study how roles are assigned within teams and how this affects team performance. Subjects play the takeover game in pairs consisting of a buyer and a seller. Understanding optimal play is very demanding for buyers and trivial for sellers. Teams perform better when roles are assigned endogenously or teammates are allowed to chat about their decisions, but the interaction effect between endogenous role assignment and chat unexpectedly worsens team performance. We argue that ego depletion provides a likely explanation for this surprising result.

Keywords: role selection in teams; team performance; takeover game; winner's curse; communication; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 C92 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2011-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-ppm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published - published in: International Economic Review, 2018, 59(3), 1547-1569.

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Working Paper: Role selection and team performance (2011)
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