Team Familiarity and Productivity in Cardiac Surgery Operations: The Effect of Dispersion, Bottlenecks and Task Complexity

Fluid teams are commonly used by a variety of organizations to perform similar and repetitive yet highly critical and knowledge-intensive tasks. In this paper, we develop and test a model of knowledge transfer based on team composition dynamics in fluid team operations. Using a granular dataset of 6,206 cardiac surgeries from the cardiac unit of a private hospital in Europe over more than seven years, our study offers a micro-founded account of how team familiarity (i.e., shared work experience) influences team productivity. We propose that in addition to average team familiarity, managers should also consider more nuanced team composition dynamics including familiarity dispersion, bottlenecks, how familiarity is gained, and what kind of tasks benefit the most from familiarity. We observe that teams with high dispersion of pairwise familiarity exhibit lower team productivity, and the existence of a “bottleneck-pair” may significantly hinder overall knowledge transfer capability, thus, productivity of fluid teams. In addition, we observe that familiarity gained through complicated tasks in the past has a higher impact on productivity than familiarity gained through less complicated tasks. Finally, our results suggest that the positive effect of average team familiarity on productivity is enhanced when performing more complicated tasks. Our study provides new operational insights to improve productivity of fluid teams with better team composition strategies.

Key words: fluid teams, productivity, team familiarity, dispersion, bottleneck, task complexity