Disentangling the Effect of Experience-based Faultlines on Team Performance in E-sports

Electronic sports (e-sports) is growing around the globe, with more and more individuals participating as players or spectators. To win in professional tournaments, deliberate selection of team players with diverse experience is necessary to ensure an element of surprise while maintaining a certain degree of coordination. Building on faultlines theory, we posit experience-based faultlines as a focal determinant of team performance in e-sports tournaments. Furthermore, through a comprehensive review of extant literature, we derive a typology of experience attributes that are implicit to e-sports teams and from which experience-based faultlines could emerge. Experience-based faultlines, which originate from the alignment of players based on their experience attributes (i.e., leader, role-play, prior, cooperative and rival), have emerged as a novel type of faultlines in e-sports teams. In turn, these experience-based faultlines are postulated to exert an effect on e-sports team performance. Findings from this study bear implications for both theory and practice.