Repetition or Reconfiguration: Project Characteristics and Mobile Professionals’ Performance

Experience, measured as seniority, is seldom sufficient to explain individual professionals’ abilities to contribute with valuable knowledge to team production. We need to pay attention to professionals’ knowledge and its fit to the project they engage in. In many industries and settings, the cognitive quality of knowledge held by individual professionals is the key microfoundation for project level performance. This paper empirically tests effects of project participants with and without knowledge diversity for project level performance for projects aiming for varying degrees of repetition and reconfiguration. The results indicate that project performance benefits form contributions from individuals holding diverse knowledge only when projects aim for high differentiation levels. This positive association is not just moderated, it may even be reversed in the case of professionals participating in low differentiation level projects aiming for repetition of already proven formulas.