Effective staffing of projects for reconciling conflict between cost efficiency and quality

Abstract

Project-based organizations face significant challenges as they make decisions about staffing projects. Although staffing teams with members who have the appropriate expertise is important, managers also consider factors such as the amount of experience members have working with each other in the past (team familiarity). Additionally, companies are concerned with increasing the utilization of employee time, so managers assign employees to multiple concurrent projects (multiteaming) to reduce downtime and maximize use of expertise. However, questions exist as to how team familiarity and multiteaming contribute to project outcomes, particularly operational capabilities such as cost efficiency and quality. In this study, we present countervailing hypotheses and empirically examine how team familiarity and multiteaming influence the tradeoff between cost efficiency and quality. Results show that team familiarity mitigates the cost efficiency-quality tradeoff, allowing teams to attain both capabilities. In contrast, multiteaming increases the tradeoff between cost efficiency and quality such that teams are more likely to attain one or the other, but not both. In light of the findings, we provide staffing suggestions to practitioners for effective management of project teams.