Cross‐functional team selection concerning members' cooperative effects and capabilities overlap

Abstract

AbstractThe capabilities that are embodied in the members of the cross‐functional team represent a significant project resource. The extent to which there is a good fit among these resources and the project can impact on the effectiveness of operations. While cross‐functional project organizations have become common, many enterprises are not able to recognize the capabilities of individual project members or the teams as a whole. In this study, an integrated approach has been proposed. The assessment criteria of the proposed approach take into account interpersonal characteristics such as the non‐additive team members' cooperative effects and capability overlap, which have rarely been investigated and evaluated in previous studies. Specifically, instead of selecting candidate team members to form a team, this approach involves selecting a proper team from competitive project teams, which is a kind of team selection problem usually confronted in project‐based organizations. Several sound mathematical methods, including fuzzy measure, similarity analysis, and fuzzy programming, are used in the approach. An illustration from a real‐world six sigma project team selection demonstrates the implementation of the approach. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.