"Smells Like Team Spirit": Turnover and Team Success Through the Lens of Rock Bands
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Music
Management
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This paper focuses on exploring how team success differs across different levels of member turnover within teams. The increased use of teams in organizations has led to a growing literature on the way teams form and how they function. One important part of team development that researchers are often interested in is how long a team works together, or their tenure. Understanding the impact of team tenure on team performance allows organizations to take into account the impact of trends like member turnover when deciding how to structure their teams. With the growing importance and prevalence of team dynamics in organizations, the question begs itself: can team success be at all explained or predicted by patterns in member turnover? In order to answer this question, this research evaluates how member turnover affects team success by looking at turnover trends within musical groups formed in the 1950s-2000s. The specific research approach will be to use a regression analysis to determine if a musical group’s success can be at all attributed to the patterns of turnover they have experienced during their tenure, and then to use management theory to recommend best practices for organizations to use when thinking about teams. The reasons for focusing on musical groups as the basis for teamwork are trifold. First, the complexity and breadth of the paper’s objective necessitates choosing a narrow segment of teams to analyze, given that a “team” can be formed for many reasons and used in many contexts. Second, musical groups are one type of team where each shares a very specific objective, which is to make good music and achieve success and popularity, at least within their own genre fan base. Lastly, musical groups have member turnover information that is easily accessible, as band membership is often in the public eye. The following section will provide a brief overview of the reasons for musician turnover, in order to set the framework for the model creation.