The Liability of Familiarity: It's 'Where From' not 'How Much'

Abstract

Experience has been lauded as a boon to performance, but when a team has members with substantial experience, this can also create a number of hazards for performance prospects. Using a team-based learning perspective, we start with a critical view of team member experience on the outputs of project teams, and use collaboration history as a contingency factor that explains when “sheer team experience” is more–or less–problematic for the performance of products developed by that team. We distinguish between two kinds of collaboration history, contending that shared experience within the same organization can mitigate the hazards of experience, while shared experience outside the firm exacerbates the downsides of experience for team performance, because of the mutual reinforcement of inappropriate or problematic assumptions. We examine these predictions in the context of the video game industry, using a sample of 332 video games released by 21 game publishers from 2000 to 2009, and find results largely consistent with our hypotheses.