Disentangling the Effects of Experience-Based Faultlines in E-Sports Teams: An Empirical Analysis

Electronic sports (e-Sports) is gaining popularity with more and more individuals participating as players or spectators. To win in professional tournaments, the 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 the faultlines perspective, we posit experience-based faultlines as a focal determinant of team performance in e-Sports tournaments. 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. Analyzing data gathered from a leading e-Sports platform on 71,195 teams, this study yields novel insights into how experience-based faultlines affect team performance. Particularly, we discovered an inverted U-shaped relationship between experience-based faultlines and team coordination effectiveness, which in turn exerts a significantly positive impact on team performance. Additionally, results revealed an inverted U-shaped relationship between experience-based faultlines and team coordination instability, which in turn exerts a significantly negative impact on team performance. Implications for faultlines theory, experience, and team coordination research are discussed.