Collaborative team networks and implications for strategic HRM

Using longitudinal data from a graduate course (with 97 students grouped into 18 teams) we analyze the emergence of collaborative working patterns and the influence of personal traits on team performance and individual team member satisfaction. We find a positive effect of global centrality measures on individual satisfaction, while local centrality measures did not have a significant impact. Moreover, our results indicate that the aggregation of power within working teams is detrimental for team performance. When some individuals are in a position that allows them to exert power over others, the performance of teams suffers. On the contrary, betweenness centralization, which could enable some people to broker information across unconnected actors, could actually be beneficial for teams and increases overall performance. We conclude that combining information on team demographics and social networks might allow inferences into why certain teams perform better than others and into which areas human resource measures should be directed to improve team performance.