Staffing teams: does shared experience matter?
Managers generally allocate work according to individual skills and availability. The more precise managerial question is whether, for interdependent work, they should also favour people who have worked together before.
What the literature establishes
Robert S. Huckman, Bradley R. Staats and David M. Upton (2009, Management Science) distinguish experience in a role from familiarity gained by working with other team members. In the Indian software services projects they study, their analyses link both dimensions favourably to performance. Individual tenure alone therefore does not capture all the experience relevant to staffing a team.
The experience that develops between people
Ray Reagans, Linda Argote and Daria Brooks (2005, Management Science) examine individual experience and experience working together in a surgical setting. Their findings indicate that shared experience helps explain learning beyond individual experience alone. The proposed mechanism concerns not only knowing other people's capabilities, but also learning how to work together.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that teams should always retain the same members. Yet these studies do not demonstrate that maximum stability is optimal in every situation. Preserving certain working relationships may facilitate coordination, but must be weighed against skill availability, staff development and the ability to provide cover. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence does not settle
These field studies do not randomly assign people to teams: member selection and work characteristics remain important interpretative issues. Findings from software projects or surgical activities do not provide a universal scheduling rule. In practice, simply counting previous collaborations is also insufficient: those collaborations must have involved tasks relevant to the current work.
A practical check in Sion
As part of SHR's « Performance d'équipe » programme, a team based in Sion could test an assignment rule that preserves selected pairings for a recurring activity, without compromising qualification requirements: hydropower maintenance, care coordination, vineyard operations or Alpine tourism operations. Before and during the test, it would record relevant previous collaborations and a predefined indicator: the number of tasks requiring rework because of a coordination failure, divided by the number of completed tasks. Comparing tasks of similar types and difficulty, while documenting workload and staffing changes, would make the findings verifiable without turning a local change into causal proof. To go further: explore the Team Performance training in Sion in the canton of Valais, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Team Performance in Sion
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