Impacts of Personnel Rotation on Performance of Distributed Teams: An Experimental Study

This study employed an experimental simulation to examine how well individuals and an entire distributed team could perform tasks when some members changed locations. Meanwhile, on a theoretical level it probed into the mechanism of how personnel rotation affected performance. We found that the impacts of personnel movements were asymmetric within a distributed team. Individuals shifting from a collocated office to a computer-mediated communication (CMC) site and those remaining at CMC sites performed worse after the rotation treatment. In contrast, people moving from a CMC site to a collocated site and those remaining in the collocated office did better after the rotation. Due to the cancel-out effect of the asymmetric impacts, the performance of an overall team seemed to be stable throughout personnel movements. The findings of this paper help unify the inconsistent literature and optimize the personnel rotation strategies.