Team members’ levels of expertise and team performance: The mediating role of collective learning and the moderating role of team psychological safety.

Objective: In knowledge-intensive teams, members’ expertise is a critical resource for performance. We therefore examine how members’ levels of expertise (expertness) influence team performance via collective learning. More specifically, we predict that high overall expertness generates more diverse and higher-quality ideas from which all members can learn. Such learning, in turn, enhances team performance by enabling members to integrate one another’s knowledge and jointly reflect on potential solutions. At the same time, variation in expertness can impair collective learning and, thereby, team performance by creating competence-based status hierarchies that discourage members from building on each other’s insights. In this last situation, we argue that team psychological safety can partly mitigate these detrimental effects by encouraging members to contribute to collective learning despite differences in perceived expertise. Method: We test our predictions in a sample of 76 interdependent student teams working on a complex four-week business simulation. Results: Our results partly support our predictions. Higher overall team expertness is positively associated with team performance, and collective learning partially mediates this relationship. Variation in expertness is negatively associated with performance through reduced collective learning, but only when psychological safety is low, while no such negative relationship exists in high psychologically safe teams. Conclusion: Our study suggests that teams might benefit from high average levels of expertise, while in low psychological safety teams the variation in members’ expertness can be detrimental for learning and ultimately performance.