The Influence of Team Continuity and Prior Experience on the Success of Innovative Projects

Abstract

This study focuses on sequences of projects as a way to address the challenges of ambidexterity. We investigate the performance influence of team member continuity and domain experience across projects dependent on the projects’ novelty. We propose that a moderate level of team continuity and a higher degree of domain experience leads to higher project success for high project novelty. We test the hypotheses on a sample of 3,122 movie projects from the Hollywood film industry. This research setting allows to uniquely differentiate between team member’s previous experience, social ties, and project novelty. We applied topic modeling on movies’ plots to measure experience and project novelty. The results indicate that team continuity has a positive but decreasing influence on project success. This influence further decreases for higher novelty. Surprisingly, the results show that higher domain experience is hindering work performance for high levels of novelty. A lower level of domain experience is more favorable for the team to perform more successfully. This study offers contributions to the literatures on teams, knowledge, project management, and social network theory by offering new insights into the consequences of team composition for project sequences in innovative contexts.