Can Membership Change Bring Beneficial Outcomes to Strong Faultline Teams?

Abstract

Membership change is common in organization. However, extant research generally suggests that teams with low temporal stability (i.e., frequent membership change) tend to perform worse than teams with high temporal stability (i.e., stable membership), because membership change often disrupts team coordination. In this paper, we examine whether membership change can also bring beneficial outcome to strong faultline teams by ‘disrupting’ team conflict. We conduct experiment on 179 student teams and field survey on 71 organizational teams to test this idea. Our finding reveals a mixed benefit and cost of low temporal stability on strong faultline teams. Our experiment result supports that low temporal stability has beneficial effect to newly formed strong faultline teams by reducing conflict and increasing team performance growth. However, temporal stability does not moderate the effect of faultline on team conflict in our field survey. Instead, when strong faultline teams experience task conflict, such conflict would reduce team performance when temporal stability is low. While further research will be needed, our results provide some evidence that low temporal stability may sometimes reduce conflict of newly formed strong faultline teams, but may also intervene with effective conflict resolution among long-standing teams.