Strategies of team member selection in a project-based organization

The use of project teams to perform work has become a key mechanism through which many professional companies organize their employees' expertise to win contracts and to serve clients. The existing literature says little about the strategies that managers apply or should apply to select project team members to meet internal and external expectations. For example, what kind of attributes do managers prefer? How do they adjust these preferences when a contract is uncertain? How do their selection strategies affect project team effectiveness?; In this dissertation, I studied 70 project bid teams in a professional and technical services organization using survey, scenario experiment, and qualitative methods. From preliminary interviews and existing literature, I identified four team member selection strategies, that is, to select members with (1) specialized technical expertise, (2) connections inside and outside the organization, (3) general competence, or (4) social and collaboration skills. The resource-based view suggests that managers should emphasize specialized technical expertise and connections (a specialist strategy) over general competence and collaboration skills (a generalist strategy) to demonstrate the organization's distinguished capabilities in carrying out the project work, especially when the contract is uncertain. My results support this hypothesis. Managers reported that they put significantly more weight on specialized technical expertise in selecting team members, and they did so especially when the contract was uncertain. A scenario experiment embedded in the survey examined the effects of two sources of project uncertainty---lack of client relationship and lack of organization reputation. The results showed that managers selected team members with specialized expertise when the organization lacked a relationship with the client, and they selected team members with connections when the organization did not have a reputation in the domain of the contract. No evidence was found for the hypothesized relationship between member selection strategy and project bid outcome, but a preference for domain-specific technical expertise predicted higher contract revenue, controlling for project size and contract type. Overall, this dissertation contributes a greater understanding of expertise utilization in project-based organizations to the organization science field.