Sesión práctica

From the perspective of a manager concerned with firm-level innovation output, the task of organizing human capital into teams brings to light the dimension of across-team diversity. This concept has been relatively neglected in the literature on teams, where the focus has generally been on the team itself (versus the firm) as a unit of analysis (with a focus on the implications of within-team diversity consequently being paramount). Our development of the across-team diversity construct is an inherently firm-level one, which we argue will hold a host of theoretical implications at the intersection of work on strategy, innovation, and organization design. Puranam

et al.(2014) for example argue that all forms of organizing consist of unique solutions to the universal problems of task division, task allocation, provision of rewards, and provision of information. Taking these universal problems into account, organizing a firm’s pool of human capital in a setting where across-team diversity is a desired attribute would necessitate attention to the host of governance and incentive levers that influence how team boundaries are set, how knowledge flows within and across these boundaries, and how structures for knowledge integration might influence the extent of interactions across teams.

Our primary aim in this paper is thus to be generative with respect to the implica- tions of the across-team diversity concept, and in so doing to demonstrate that it is a relevant dimension of interest for managers concerned with effectively employing the firm’s inventive human capital. Yet our theoretical objectives go beyond this; we aim as well to identify the possible mechanisms through which the effects of across team diversity operate. Our starting point for doing so is a stylized fact emerging from the literature on teams (e.g. Bantel and Jackson, 1989;Ancona and Caldwell, 1992;Mil- liken and Martins,1996; Williams and O’Reilly,1998): teams that are diverse face a tension between the learning benefits of different perspectives, and the frictions that must be overcome for these benefits to be realized (Reagans and Zuckerman, 2001).

In the context of firm-level innovation, with the firm’s inventive human capital as the key resource, we can reframe this tension as one in which the firm-level man- ager must balance the innovation benefits of knowledge recombination arising from the diversity of inventors’ technical experience with the costs of coordination stem- ming from the particular ways in which these inventors are configured into teams. A firm’s ability to innovate is predicated on the technical experience embodied in its productive human capital (e.g. Grant, 1996; Coff, 1997), with the experience of any individual inventor consisting of that gained over her entire career (i.e., not just at

the focal firm). This diversity in inventor technical experience benefits the firm’s in- novation output because recombination of prior knowledge is a key component of the innovation process (Kogut and Zander, 1992; Hargadon and Sutton, 1997; Fleming, 2001; Katila and Ahuja, 2002; Karim and Kaul, 2015). At the same time, how- ever, coordination costs, arising from interdependencies among inventors, serve as a countervailing force (Thompson, 1967; Lawrence and Lorsch, 1967; Kretschmer and Puranam, 2008; Puranam et al., 2012; Kotha et al., 2013), thereby mitigating the innovative benefits that might arise from such diversity.

Understanding the innovation implications of alternate firm-level diversity regimes then involves weighing the relative impact of knowledge recombination and coordi- nation costs at each organization design level (across- and within-teams). With re- spect to knowledge recombination, the prior literature points to substantial innovation benefits of spanning boundaries (Rosenkopf and Nerkar, 2001). These benefits arise because spanning (e.g., in our case, team) boundaries helps overcome core rigidities (Leonard-Barton,1992) and competency traps (Levitt and March,1988), and enables inventor teams to avoid an inward focus that can reduce innovative output (Stuart and Podolny, 1996). Thus, the productivity of a particular inventor is likely to be shaped by the diversity regime in which she is surrounded. “Boundary spanning” in the context of production teams can involve for example a particular inventor team gaining deeper insight (as a result of its exposure to a diverse set of specialized teams) into how its own knowledge may be applied in alternate settings. Although this might suggest benefits to an across-team diversity regime, since in such a setting the “diverse knowledge” to be recombined is more likely to span team boundaries, it is necessary to weigh this against any associated costs of coordination stemming from such a diversity regime.

there is the need to coordinate among inventors within the team itself; in such a case the inventive process itself necessitates some degree of common ground and joint predictive knowledge that can smooth the ongoing interactions among inventors on a team in order for the team itself to be productive. Second, there is the need to coordinate across multiple teams when knowledge sharing is desirable (e.g., when a given team might benefit from its specialized knowledge being applied in new ways), or when inventions represent modular pieces of a larger effort that must then be reintegrated at a higher level (Kretschmer and Puranam,2008). Effects at both levels are likely to influence inventor productivity, with the relative ease of coordinating interdependencies within versus across team boundaries a function of factors such as the nature of the knowledge effort being pursued, the extent of the benefits that might arise from sharing information on the use of that knowledge, and the degree of integration necessary at the firm-level.

This discussion suggests that the relative benefits of knowledge recombination as compared to the coordination costs necessary to achieve these benefits under each of the two organizational team design regimes (across- versus within-team diversity) is a question that needs to be adjudicated empirically. Accordingly, in the analyses that follow we examine the average main effects of the two team organization regimes; and then further investigate the possible mechanisms driving these effects, with particular emphasis on how each diversity regime shapes inventor productivity.