Familiarity, complexity, and team performance in geographically distributed software development

While prior research has found that familiarity is beneficial to team performance, it is not clear whether different kinds of familiarity are more or less beneficial when the work has different types of complexity. In this paper, we theorize how task and team familiarity interact with task and team coordination complexity to influence team performance. We posit that task familiarity is more beneficial with more complex tasks (i.e., tasks that are larger or with more complex structures) and that team familiarity is more beneficial when team coordination is more difficult (i.e., for larger or geographically dispersed teams). Finally, we propose that the effects of task familiarity and team familiarity on team performance are complementary. Based on a field study of geographically distributed software teams, two of our hypotheses are disconfirmed: Our results show that the beneficial effects of task familiarity decline when tasks are more structurally complex and are independent of task size. Conversely, the hypotheses for team familiarity are confirmed as the benefit of team familiarity for team performance is enhanced when team coordination is more challenging – i.e., when teams are larger or geographically dispersed. Finally, surprisingly, we find that task and team familiarity are more substitutive than complementary in their joint effects on team performance: Task familiarity improves team performance more strongly when team familiarity is weak and vice versa. Our study contributes by revealing how different types of familiarity can enhance team performance in a real-world setting where the task and its coordination can be highly complex.