A cooperative effect-based decision support model for team formation

Firms' operation requires teamwork. But it is always a challenge for firms to build teams that consist of suitable employees and meet the requirements of projects. Team candidates' individual capabilities and their abilities in building and maintaining interpersonal relationship are identified as the two key factors affecting team formation. This paper extends previous studies on team formation and proposes a cooperative effect-based team formation model (CE-TFM) for decision-makers in firms to select the most competent and cooperative members. The model aims to build a strong team by selecting the proper members who can help the team improve its performance. Specifically, a genetic algorithm is designed to find solutions for the proposed model. Covering and the positive cooperative effect indicator are applied to describe the interpersonal relationship among team candidates. In addition, the effect aggregation operator is adopted to find solutions for the positive team formation model. Particularly, four methods and the corresponding calculation procedures are provided for solving CE-TFM. Finally, a case study is implemented to test the proposed model. The results indicate that CE-TFM can not only merge decision-making preferences into the process of team formation but also improve team performance.