Learning from Many: Partner Exposure and Team Familiarity in Fluid Teams
研究在流动团队中，新员工通过接触更多合作伙伴获得的经验如何影响运营绩效，发现对于非标准化流程，合作伙伴接触直接提升绩效；对于标准化流程，需达到一定个人经验门槛才有效，且在高工作负荷时效果更强。
In services where teams come together for short collaborations, managers are often advised to strive for high team familiarity so as to improve coordination and consequently, performance. However, inducing high team familiarity by keeping team membership intact can limit workers’ opportunities to acquire useful knowledge and alternative practices from exposure to a broader set of partners. We introduce an empirical measure for prior partner exposure and estimate its impact (along with that of team familiarity) on operational performance using data from the London Ambulance Service. Our analysis focuses on ambulance transports involving new paramedic recruits, where exogenous changes in team membership enable identification of the performance effect. Specifically, we investigate the impact of prior partner exposure on time spent during patient pickup at the scene and patient handover at the hospital. We find that the effect varies with the process characteristics. For the patient pickup process, which is less standardized, greater partner exposure directly improves performance. For the more standardized patient handover process, this beneficial effect is triggered beyond a threshold of sufficient individual experience. In addition, we find some evidence that this beneficial performance impact of prior partner exposure is amplified during periods of high workload, particularly for the patient handover process. Finally, a counterfactual analysis based on our estimates shows that a team formation strategy emphasizing partner exposure outperforms one that emphasizes team familiarity by about 9.2% in our empirical context. This paper was accepted by Jay Swaminathan, operations management.