THEME #1: BUILDING CAPABILITIES THROUGH TEAM FAMILIARITY
Description
Are organizational capabilities simply the aggregation of individual skills and experience, or do they also depend on particular connections between individuals developed through prior work experience? Since a capability consists of the accumulated knowledge of an organization and its members, understanding how capabilities are developed includes investigating individuals and their interactions. This suggests that experience gained from repeated interactions between defined sets of people in an organization may be important to knowledge creation and the subsequent capability development process. However, these potentially vital interactions have seldom been examined with respect to capability development. To accomplish this task, I collected multiple years of project and individual-level data on software development projects at Wipro Technologies, a large Indian firm in the global outsourced software services industry (including over 1,100 projects and more than 13,000 individuals). These data allow me to analyze teams, team members, and outcomes for which the teams are responsible.
The first paper of my dissertation explores how team familiarity (i.e., prior shared work experience) influences the creation and development of organizational capabilities. We also examine how changes in team structure (i.e., the hierarchical roles that individuals hold within the team) affect performance. In the third paper of my dissertation, I examine whether certain role relationships within a team differentially affect organizational capability development. Rather than treating all interactions as equal, I separate the effects of hierarchical team familiarity (a manager's prior work experience with front-line members on a team) and horizontal team familiarity (front-line team members' previous work experience with one another), and examine their linkage to project team performance. I also consider whether team familiarity moderates the impact of project complexity on team performance.