Abstract
The team composition of a project team is an essential determinant of the success of innovation projects that aim to produce novel solution ideas. Team assembly is essentially complex and sensitive decision-making, yet little supported by information technology (IT). In order to design appropriate digital tools for team assembly, and team formation more broadly, we call for profoundly understanding the practices and principles of matchmakers who manually assemble teams in specific contexts. This paper reports interviews with 13 expert matchmakers who are regularly assembling multidisciplinary innovation teams in various organizational environments in Finland. Based on qualitative analysis of their experiences, we provide insights into their established practices and principles in team assembly. We conceptualize and describe common tactical approaches on different typical levels of team assembly, including arranging approaches like “key-skills-first”, “generalist-first” and “topic-interest-first”, and balancing approaches like “equally-skilled-teams” and “high-expertise-teams”. The reported empirical insights can help to design IT systems that support team assembly according to different tactics.
Highlights
In knowledge work, organizations’ success is increasingly dependent on team work, which, ideally, allows individuals to be more productive and creative than they could be on their own (Salas et al 2018; Hall et al 2018; Tebes and Thai 2018)
This observation consolidated our decision to focus on team assembly as decision-making in terms of social matching, regardless of the information technology (IT) tools in use, rather than analyzing the use of very conventional tools like Microsoft Excel
We organize the results according to three main themes: team assembly as a decision-making practice, team composition including different approaches, and relevant individuals’ qualities in this type of teamwork
Summary
Organizations’ success is increasingly dependent on team work, which, ideally, allows individuals to be more productive and creative than they could be on their own (Salas et al 2018; Hall et al 2018; Tebes and Thai 2018). The proposed solutions are often based on self-assembly (Harris et al 2019; Lykourentzou et al 2017), where people decide by themselves with whom to cooperate. To this end, this study focuses on experts who regularly assemble teams in various professional and organizational contexts. This study focuses on experts who regularly assemble teams in various professional and organizational contexts In this paper, they are referred to as matchmakers, even if in everyday life the term often refers to romantic matching
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