Leadership Talk by Professor Fabrizio Salvador
Project Team Experiential Diversity, Project Performance, and Voluntary Turnover in the Context of IT and Consulting Services.
- Starts:14:00, 9 October 2026
- Ends:14:45, 9 October 2026
- Location:BI - campus Oslo, A2-Blue 5 or via Zoom
- Contact:Lina Daouk-Öyry (lina.daouk-oyry@bi.no)
Abstract
Project-based firms in knowledge-intensive industries pursue the dual goal of ensuring project profitability and creating a work environment that retains human capital—a key asset in this setting. From an operational standpoint, team composition is a key lever for supporting these two goals, but it presents a theoretical and practical conundrum. On the one hand, assigning employees to experientially diverse teams creates learning opportunities, which should improve performance. On the other hand, as learning increases employees’ market value, it can paradoxically also raise the risk of voluntary turnover. It can potentially harm performance as well, because creating experientially diverse teams implies giving up the potential benefits of stable, specialized teams. In this study, we investigate the effect of team experiential diversity using data from 810 project teams, involving 3,139 employees drawn from a multinational consulting and IT services firm. We focus on team experiential diversity relative to customer experience (i.e., client experience diversity) and familiarity among team members (i.e., coworker experience diversity) and find that both facets of team experiential diversity increase project performance but have an inverted U-shaped relationship with voluntary turnover. Overall, our results indicate that, below a critical threshold, changes in team experiential diversity entail a performance-retention trade-off that must be considered when composing project teams, and that is different from other trade-offs identified by research in voluntary work settings.
The Leadership Talks series
Leadership Talks is a series of seminars about topics related to leadership, change and sustainability, project management and organizational psychology, hosted by the Department of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at BI Norwegian Business School.
About Fabrizio Salvador
Fabrizio Salvador
He received his Ph.D in Operations Management from the University of Padova, where he also graduated in Industrial Engineering. Dr. Salvador has also served as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Shanghai University and as an adjunct Faculty Research Associate at Arizona State University. He has been included in the prestigious Thinkers50 Radar ranking of management thought leaders.
Dr. Salvador's research lies at the intersection of operations management and strategic human capital management. He pioneered the use of people analytics methodologies to explore how organizations can build flexibility at the individual, team, project and organizational levels, foster performance in knowledge-intensive work, and build resilience in core processes. More recently, Dr. Salvador broadened his focus on human centric operations to include sustainability by investigating the relationship between organizational design practices and employee well-being and fulfillment.
Dr. Salvador has been recognized as a thought leader in the field and has received several awards for his research. His work has been published in top-tier academic journals, including Organization Science, Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Journal of Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, and Decision Sciences. Dr. Salvador has also held leadership positions in several academic outlets, including serving as the founding Department Editor for the Journal of Operations Management, Senior Editor for Production and Operations Management, and Associate Editor for the Decision Sciences Journal.
In addition to his academic work, Dr. Salvador has collaborated with numerous companies to help them improve operational performance through training, proof of concepts and field experiments. Among these companies are AstraZeneca, DHL, Ernst&Young, IBM, John Deere, Johnson&Johnson, Nokia, Telefonica, Xerox, Tetra Pak, Unilever, CAP Gemini, Sener, Permasteelisa, PriceWaterhousCoopers, and WeCare.
Join the Leadership Talk online
Join the seminar online via Zoom.
Meeting ID: 660 1818 1203
Passcode: 786006