Forming effective worker teams with multi-functional skill requirements

Throughout much of the past century, manufacturing efficiencies were gained by constructing systems from independently designed and optimized tasks. Recent theories and practice have extolled the virtues of team-based practices that rely on human flexibility and empowerment to improve integrated system performance. The formation of teams requires consideration of innate tendencies and interpersonal skills as well as technical skills. In this project we develop and test mathematical models for formation of effective human teams. Team membership is selected to ensure sufficient breadth and depth of technical skills. In addition, measures of worker conative tendencies are used along with empirical results on desirable team mix to form maximally effective teams. A mathematical programming formulation for the team selection problem is presented. A heuristic solution is proposed and evaluated.