Do Many Hands Make Light Work? The Contingent Effects of Online Team Size in Open Collaboration Contests

Open collaboration has emerged as a powerful tool for harnessing collective intelligence to solve complex problems in the rapidly evolving digital era. As organizations increasingly rely on online contests to foster open collaboration, understanding the dynamics of teamwork in open collaboration contests becomes crucial. This study examines how team composition attributes moderate the curvilinear relationship between team size and online team performance in open collaboration contests. Drawing on the benefit-cost framework from utility maximization theory, the results demonstrate that team size has an inverted U-shaped effect on team performance through the tradeoff of expertise aggregation benefits and resource coordination costs. Notably, diversity in team abilities shifts the turning point of this U-shaped curve to the right due to the benefits of expertise aggregation. The presence of star members in a team shifts the turning point of this U-shaped curve to the left due to the additional costs of exponential growth in resource coordination. Our work makes contributions to the team management literature by uncovering the dynamic associations between team size, team composition and online team performance in the complex open collaboration environment. Moreover, it offers practical implications for the management of individual contestants and the governance of online contest platforms.