How Does Member Change Affect Team Performance?

The external dynamic environment makes team unstable.Wherein member change is a frequent manifestation of such turbulence and considered to be an event that is both disruptive and critical.Extant studies have not considered the complexity of teams,focusing mostly on the individuals who experience change.However,team is not the simple sum of individuals,instead,it is a complex accumulation of persontask-tool relationships.Therefore,it is necessary to clarify what costs will be shared by all members within the team,and to clarify the mechanisms of member change and its impact on performance outcomes.In addition,characteristics of team members are also dynamic,but current researches are still used to exmaming their effects under static assumptions.Changes in team member cause corresponding changes in the compositon of member characteristics.Hence,it is fundamental to find new dynamic moderating characteristics to deepen the understanding of team changes and enrich the present dynamic perspective.Moreover,when examining team characteristics from a differentiation angle,existing studies have vague definitions about difference,which easily leads to disputes among conclusions.In view of this,this study refines the differences in member characteristics by subdividing the structure of member characteristics into vertical distance differences and horizontal dispersion differences to promote the examination of deep-level differences in member characteristics.In summary,this study takes member change as the object and explores its effect on team collaboration processes and team performance based on the theory of small groups as complex systems,and introduces the moderating effects of work ability distance and work ability dispersion in this process,in an attempt to explain the inconsistent findings with the social comparison theory and integrate the results of previous studies.This empirical study selects the sample of NBA teams ranging from 2001 to 2019 regular season.Variables including member change,team collaboration,team performance,team work ability,distance and dispersion are measured with reference to existing literature.Introducing team work ability distance and dispersion as moderators,how work ability diversity at different gap levels affect member change events were examined from the vertical and horizontal perspective respectively.The results show that(1)member changes are negatively related to team collaboration and team performance.Local individual changes will transmit its impact to the whole team,which requires team-scale response;(2)team collaboration is a critical mediating mechanism for member changes to influence team performance.The members,tasks and resources within the team are matched in a coordinated network,then transferred to other activities through the collaborative process,converting virtual resources into concrete performance results;(3)work ability distance has an inverted U-shaped moderation on the relationship between member change and team collaboration,indicating that a greater disparity in work capacity is more preferred;(4)work ability dispersion has an inverted U-shaped effect on the relationship between member change and team collaboration.A higher dispersion of work ability distribution will reverse the deterioration of the team process caused by a low dispersion distribution and to some extent compensate for the loss of collaboration caused by member changes.The innovative contribution of this paper lies in the following aspects.Firstly,it complements the perspective of existing employees in the team,clarifies the negative impact of member changes on team processes and outcome,and illustrates the dynamics and complexity of the team.Secondly,it reiterates the value of team collaboration as a tool to open the "black box" and shows the potential mechanism of teamwork during member change,bridging the antecedent changes of the team with output performance.Third,it extends the dynamic perspective by breaking the static presupposition of team work ability structure,broadens the boundary conditions in member change field,and solves the trouble of quantifying ability indexes.Fourthly,it explores the reasons for inconsistent conclusions in the differentiated work ability characteristics.Through subdividing the diversity structure into dispersion and distance dimensions,it dissects the non-linear impact of team’s work ability distance and dispersion on the collaboration process after member changes,which integrates the complex understanding of the team.