Team Familiarity and Productivity in Cardiac Surgery Operations: The Effect of Dispersion, Bottlenecks, and Task Complexity

Fluid teams are commonly used by a variety of organizations to perform similar and repetitive yet highly critical and knowledge‐intensive tasks. Such teams operate for a limited time, after which they dissolve and some of their members may work together again as part of another team. Using a granular data set of 6,206 cardiac surgeries from a private hospital in Europe over seven years, our study offers a new and detailed account of how team familiarity (i.e., shared work experience) influences team productivity. We highlight the role of nuanced team composition dynamics beyond average team familiarity. We observe that teams with high dispersion of pairwise familiarity exhibit lower team productivity, and the existence of a ‘bottleneck‐pair’ may significantly hinder overall knowledge transfer capability, thus, productivity of fluid teams. In addition, we find that the higher the percentage of familiarity gained from complex tasks, the higher the productivity of the team. Finally, our results suggest that the positive effect of average team familiarity on productivity is enhanced when performing more complicated tasks. Our study provides new operational insights to improve productivity of fluid teams with better team composition strategies.