A team formation model based on knowledge and collaboration

Appointing a good leader to the position of team manager and having competent workers collaborate as team members is a key to success in business activities of an enterprising institution, The traditional methodologies of human resource management have defined the required abilities for team managers and team members, and evaluated those abilities of employees. However, it is difficult to consider those abilities systematically in practice. In addition, the current management paradigm undergoes rapid transitions into knowledge management. In step with these trends, this study presents a framework for analyzing the knowledge of the candidates for managers and team members for the new team, and proposes a genetic algorithm and social network measures for choosing a team manager and team members. A prototype was built for testing the feasibility of the model. The testing data are from an R&D institute's human resource management department. The results show that our proposed approach is a quantitative and systematic method for selecting proper personnel for appropriate teams. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.