Variation in experience and team familiarity

In settings ranging from product development to service delivery, fluid teams of individuals with different sets of experience are tasked with projects that are critical to their organization's success. Although building teams from individuals with different prior experience is increasingly necessary, prior work examining the relationship between experience and performance fails to find a consistent effect of variation in experience on performance. We hypothesize that team familiarity - team members' prior experience working with one another - is one mechanism that helps teams leverage the potential benefits of variation in team member experience by alleviating coordination problems that such variation may create. In team familiarity, our paper identifies one mechanism for capturing the performance benefits of variation in experience and provides insight into how the broader management of experience accumulation affects team performance.