Abstract
Recent research highlights team leader experience as an important factor associated with quality improvement project success. In this paper, we disentangle team leader experience into two distinct facets—team leader “connectedness” and project type experience—and examine their relationship to project success. We apply social network analysis techniques to develop a novel measure for team leader connectedness, which captures the extent to which a leader has connections to a variety of people from working together on prior improvement projects. Rather than only counting these connections, this measure weights each connection by how well-connected, in turn, those individuals are. Based on analysis of archival data of six sigma projects spanning six years from a Fortune 500 consumer products manufacturer, we find that team leader connectedness and experience leading projects of the same type both increase the likelihood of project success. We also show that organizational experience moderates the relationship between team leader same-type project experience and project success. However, this is not the case for the relationship between team leader connectedness and project success. These results provide insights regarding how dimensions of team leader experience and organizational experience collectively impact the operational performance of improvement teams.
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