Team staffing modes in organizations: Strategic considerations on individual and cluster hiring approaches

Team-based work structures are increasingly used in organizations as a viable means of improving performance. However, there is relatively little research on the practices of staffing teams and the implications of such practices with regard to a firm's competitive advantage. In this paper, we evaluate methods of team staffing from a strategic human resource management perspective. Included in this discussion is an extrapolation of individual approaches to team staffing, which include staffing individuals to build a team, and cluster hiring, which refers to organizational efforts to acquire and fit a pre-existing team with a new role. In particular, we evaluate how individual and cluster hiring modes influence the competitive advantage of organizations, linking human resource management practices with strategic outcomes, and presenting testable propositions to guide future research and practice in team staffing. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.