Research performance of teams in business and management: the impact of team size and characteristics

Abstract

Despite inherent differences across disciplines, collaboration in general and larger teams of co-authors in particular, are prevalent strategies to increase research performance via academic publications. We take a more fine-grained view of this relationship by distinguishing between two dimensions of research performance, namely impact (i.e., subsequent citations of a paper) and prestige (i.e., top academic journals). Different from prior literature, we argue that there are both benefits and pitfalls in having larger teams, and these trade-offs will affect differently the impact and prestige of academic research. Specifically, we propose that while team size will enhance linearly the impact of a paper, it will contribute in a non-linear fashion to its prestige. Furthermore, these relationships will be moderated by the knowledge and international diversity of the team. We test these hypotheses using bibliometric data on more than 40,000 publications between 1994 and 2013 papers across 21 sub-fields within the realm of Business and Management. Our results broadly support our theoretical assertions. We discuss some practical implications for assessing and stimulating the research performance of academics in business schools.