Organizational team formation: projects, structures, and transactive memory

Abstract

Team formation brings together organizational members with complementary capabilities to address projects. This study examines how project-based organizations form teams in response to an ongoing stream of different projects. We consider team formation a phenomenon shaped by organization structure, project attributes, and learning from project experience. We address the effects of two alternative organization structures (functional and team-based) and four project attributes (project size, heterogeneity, decomposability, and ambiguity) on the efficiency of project team staffing. We build these features into two agent-based models grounded on nine case studies of project-based organizations. These models highlight how organizations achieve efficiency in team formation over time as transactive memory develops in response to ongoing project variation. Our models explain how organization structure and particular project attributes affect the development and application of transactive memory. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press in association with Oxford University Press and the Industrial and Corporate Change Association. All rights reserved.