Antecedents and Consequences of Mutual Knowledge in Teams

39 Pages Posted: 14 Nov 2008

See all articles by Sinan Aral

Sinan Aral

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Sloan School of Management

Erik Brynjolfsson

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); Stanford

Marshall W. Van Alstyne

Boston University - Department of Management Information Systems; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Sloan School

Date Written: November, 10 2008

Abstract

A tension exists between two well-established streams of literature on the performance of teams. One stream contends that teams with diverse backgrounds, social structures, knowledge, and experience function more effectively because they bring novel information to bear on problems that cannot be solved by groups of homogeneous individuals. In contrast, the literature on mutual knowledge contends that shared information and experience is essential to effective communication, trust, understanding and coordination among team members. Furthermore, several distinct antecedents of mutual information and knowledge have been hypothesized, making it difficult to manage information overlap in teams. In this paper, we use a unique data set of observed email content from 1382 executive recruiting teams and detailed accounting data on their productivity to examine both the antecedents and performance effects of shared versus diverse information. We find clear evidence of an inverted-U shaped relationship between mutual information and team productivity. A significant amount of information overlap among team members is associated with higher performance while extremes of too little or too much mutual information hamper performance. We also find that geographic dispersion and social network distance are strong predictors of mutual knowledge failures, while demographic dissimilarity and organizational distance do not predict the degree of mutual information in our data. Our work helps bring together the divergent streams of literature on mutual knowledge, information diversity, and the management of team performance.

Keywords: Mutual Knowledge, Diversity, Social Networks, Demography, Geographic Dispersion, Information Distance, Teams, Performance

Suggested Citation

Aral, Sinan and Brynjolfsson, Erik and Van Alstyne, Marshall W., Antecedents and Consequences of Mutual Knowledge in Teams (November, 10 2008). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1299260 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1299260

Sinan Aral (Contact Author)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Sloan School of Management ( email )

100 Main Street
E62-416
Cambridge, MA 02142
United States

Erik Brynjolfsson

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) ( email )

1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States

Stanford ( email )

366 Galvez St
Stanford, CA 94305
United States

HOME PAGE: http://brynjolfsson.com

Marshall W. Van Alstyne

Boston University - Department of Management Information Systems ( email )

595 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, MA 02215
United States
617-358-3571 (Phone)

HOME PAGE: http://questromapps.bu.edu/mgmt_new/Profiles/VanAlstyneMarshall.html

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Sloan School ( email )

Initiative on the Digital Economy
245 First St, Room E94-1521
Cambridge, MA 02142
United States
617-253-0768 (Phone)

HOME PAGE: http://web.mit.edu/marshall/www/home.html

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
538
Abstract Views
3,914
Rank
95,064
PlumX Metrics