Getting the Right Mix: Decomposing the Relationship between Team Knowledge Diversity and Performance

Strategy & Business Policy

Speaker: John Eklund

Assistant Professor - Marshall USC

Conference  Jouy-en-Josas T017

ABSTRACT

The knowledge diversity of a team affects its ability to tackle knowledge-intensive tasks. Existing studies in this domain focus on teams comprised of specialists, individuals having deep knowledge in a specific area. However, in many contexts, teams include specialists as well as more generalist individuals. In this paper, we account for mixes of specialists and generalists by decomposing team level knowledge diversity into two components: the knowledge similarity between individuals and the mean knowledge diversity within individuals. We theorize that each of these components has a positive association with team performance but interact negatively. We find support for our arguments in the film industry. Together, our results provide a novel explanation for why team knowledge diversity and performance have an inverted U-shaped relationship.