Unraveling the Effects of Experience-based Faultlines in E-sports Teams: The Moderating Influence of Team Winning Momentum

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 faultlines theory, 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 on 4,051 e-sports teams, this study yields novel insights into how experience-based faultlines affect team performance. Particularly, we discover that experience-based faultlines promote team coordination, which in turn exerts a significantly positive impact on team performance. We further observe that team winning momentum not only impairs team coordination, but it also reduces team performance.