Who You Know vs. What You Know: The Impact of Social Position and Knowledge on Team Performance

Abstract

Organizational behavior theories generally agree that human capital is critical to teams and organizations, but little guidance exists on the extent to which such theories accurately explain the relative contributions of individual actors to overall performance. Using newly created network measures and simulations based on data obtained from a software development firm, we investigate the relative effectiveness of social network theory and resource dependency theory as predictors of individuals' contributions to team performance. Our results indicate that individual impacts on team performance are more closely associated with knowledge and task dimensions than with social network structure. Furthermore, given that knowledge may be assessed a priori, these factors provide useful guidance for structuring teams and predicting team performance.

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