Team Disagreement and Productive Persuasion

TL;DR

This paper examines how open disagreement among team members about technology productivity can enhance team performance and output, especially when multiple technologies are available, through a dynamic belief-updating model.

Contribution

It introduces a model showing that disagreement can increase productivity and welfare, and provides optimal team formation strategies based on belief diversity.

Findings

Disagreement boosts team output when only one technology is available.

Matching team members with opposing beliefs maximizes total output.

Disagreeing teams outperform like-minded teams with multiple technologies.

Abstract

We study how open disagreement influences team performance in a dynamic production game. Team members can hold different priors about the productivity of the available production technologies. Initial beliefs are common knowledge and updated based on observed production outcomes. We show that when only one technology is available, a player works harder early on when her coworkers are initially more pessimistic about the technology's productivity. Holding average team optimism constant, this force implies that a team's expected output increases in the degree of disagreement of its members. A manager with the task of forming two-member teams from a large workforce maximizes total expected output by matching coworkers' beliefs in a negative assortative way. When alternative, equally good, production technologies are available, a disagreeing team outperforms any like-minded team in terms of average output and team members' welfare.