Work

Team formation with complementary skills

Year: 2018

Type: article

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.

Source: Journal of Economics & Management Strategy

DOI: 10.1111/jems.12296

Authors: Mürüvvet Büyükboyaci, Andrea Robbett

Institutions: Middle East Technical University, Middlebury College

Language: English

Topic: Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies

Subfield: Safety Research

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Decent work and economic growth

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,240