Fluid teams and fluid tasks

In many manufacturing and service settings, fluid teams of individuals with varied sets of experience are responsible for projects that are critical to their organizations' success. Although building teams from individuals with varied prior experience is increasingly necessary, prior work 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 benefits of variation in team experience by alleviating coordination problems that variation creates. Just as teams are growing more fluid, so too are the tasks they perform. Due to many factors, work is often changed in-process. We hypothesize that team familiarity and variation in experience may help to moderate the negative effect of task change on performance. We use detailed project- and individual-level data from an Indian software services firm to examine these effects. We find the interaction of team familiarity and variation in experience has a positive effect on the likelihood of a project being delivered on time and on budget while variation in experience moderates the negative effect of task change on performance. Our results shed light on how the management of experience accumulation affects operational performance.