A large body of research accumulated on the consequences that absolute team size (i.e., team headcount) entails for the performance of teams working on innovative tasks. However, there is a dearth of research on team size in relation to a team’s assignments and objectives (i.e., relative team size). How this relative team size might influence innovation teams is therefore poorly understood. To stimulate theorizing on relative team size, we derive propositions from understaffing theory on how varying levels of relative team size affect teams with innovative tasks. We provide a more fine-grained analysis by differentiating between different dimensions of these teams’ performance (i.e., team creativity, output quality, and team efficiency) and develop an input-mediator-output model. Implications of our theoretical considerations and avenues for future research are discussed.

中文翻译：

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相对团队规模对具有创新任务的团队的影响

关于绝对团队规模（即团队人数）对从事创新任务的团队的绩效所造成的后果，已经进行了大量的研究。但是，关于团队规模与团队的任务和目标（即相对团队规模）的研究很少。因此，人们对这种相对的团队规模如何影响创新团队的理解很少。为了激发有关相对团队规模的理论，我们从人员配置不足的理论推论出不同水平的相对团队规模如何影响具有创新任务的团队。通过区分这些团队绩效的不同维度（即团队创造力，输出质量和团队效率），我们提供了更细粒度的分析，并开发了输入介体输出模型。