New Blood vs. Experience: Who Performs Better in the Long Run?

Hello friends 🙂

Teams are an essential component for success in everyday life. However, it is unclear whether stable teams or teams with changing members perform better. In this episode, we discuss what type of team does best and why.

🔐 Close or Open Teams? New Blood or Experience?

Teams are an essential component for success in everyday life, from your colleagues at work and your local football team, to the friends and strangers you play with online. Some of these teams are more stable than others. You may play football or work with the same people for years or even decades, but you may also experience teams with a high turnover rate, e.g., in your clan or guild.

The first two are examples of a closed team, where members work only with one another over a long period of time and across various tasks, with minimal to no changes in the team. Teams whose members change over time are called open teams.

It makes sense to assume that closed teams would outperform open teams because their members have learned to work together, have a better communication system, higher levels of trust and team cohesion, and have specialized roles. However, other studies suggest that open teams have advantages over closed teams because "new blood" brings in fresh ideas, skills, and helps to reflect on internal processes.

❓ 4,871 EverQuest(ers)

To help settle the debate, the authors used data from the MMOG (Massive Multiplayer Online Game) EverQuest II (EQ2). Similar to other MMOGs, the player creates a character and tries to improve it (level, items, money, characteristics, etc.). One important way to achieve this is by completing quests. Heroic and Epic quests require small teams—the focus of the study.

Over a 29-week period, 30,745 character data points were generated from the server logs, including information such as deaths, starting a quest, points for completing a quest, character attributes, and levels. After cleaning the data, the authors ended up with 4,871 teams (1,175 closed and 3,696 open teams) across 8,186 quests. Team performance was calculated based on the amount of experience points a team earned per hour.

🏆 Open or Closed Teams, Who wins?

The most striking finding of the study is that team performance (of both open and closed teams) changes over time. "Closed teams initially tended to perform better than open teams [1]."

"However, as the teams play longer, the story begins to change [1]." After completing 10 quests, the performance gap between the two team types narrows. Over the long run, open teams seem to have the upper hand and perform better. Both teams benefit from their shared experience to a certain point. However, over a longer period, there is diminishing return—meaning the value of completing additional quests together decreases, and so does the performance for closed teams.

"Open teams improved their performance throughout their work, while closed teams’ performance faded during repetitions [1]."

🤔 What can We Learn from It?

The authors offer explanations as to why the performance curves for open and closed teams look different. First, they argue that open teams are better at adjusting to new circumstances and quests by bringing in new members with different skills and strategies better suited to what's ahead.

It makes sense to change team composition as the environment, goals, or needs of the team change. Some in-game characters have special abilities and skills that others lack, but these may be required or beneficial for certain quests. The same concept applies outside the virtual world.

If your football team is going to face a strong opponent, adjusting the team lineup makes sense, even though the starting lineup is known to play well together. Similarly, at your workplace, imagine your boss tells your team to work on a new project that requires skills your current members don't have. Would you rather slowly grind through it, acquiring the necessary skills, or bring in someone who already knows how to do the tasks required?

Thanks for reading, and I hope you all have a great week. Regards,

Christian 🙂

References

[1] Ahmed et al., 2019