Assembling the team: An empirical analysis of partner selection and performance in robot-assisted surgery

Similarity, competence and familiarity are recognized team assembly mechanisms – general principles that individuals adopt to choose others with whom they want to work. According to the principle of similarity, individuals are more likely to choose partners that are similar to themselves along contextually relevant dimensions. According to the competence principle, social selection is driven mainly by an evaluation of compatibility between individual skills and requirements of the task. Finally, the principle of familiarity implies that people who have worked together in the past are more likely to repeat their collaboration in the future. In this paper we use data that we have collected on Health Care Action (HCA) teams composed by one main and one assistant surgeon to explore how the effects of the team assembly mechanisms implied by these generic principles: (i) are embedded in known network self-organizing mechanisms that link internal team members to shared external partners, (ii) are contingent on the complexity of the task that the team faces and (iii) affect team performance. Relational event models estimated on more than one thousand surgeries provide evidence that, while similarity and familiarity-based mechanisms affect partner selection, the strongest predictor for team performance is represented by a variety of competence-based factors. The analysis also reveals that the effects of social selection mechanisms on performance outcomes are contingent on the complexity of the team task, which in our sample is determined by the clinical conditions of patients entering surgery. We discuss implications based on the mismatch between team assembly heuristics and effective configuration strategies.