The influence of uncertainty, collaboration, and information sharing

Profs Sara Rezaee Vessal, ESSEC Business School, and Svenja Sommer, HEC Paris, explore the effectiveness of product development teams and how managers can bring together different profiles under varying contexts and tailor incentives for optimised team performance.

Team Composition and Effective Incentives: The influence of uncertainty, collaboration, and information sharing by CoBS Editor Hari Chinni, with kind acknowledgements to Sara Rezaee Vessal. Related research: Rezaee Vessal, S., & Sommer, S. C. (2025). Team Composition and Incentive Design in Collaborative Product Development. Production and Operations Management, 34(6), 1477-1494. https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241302733 (Original work published 2025).

There was a time when midfielders were complimented in their resemblance to strikers. Today on the football pitch, likeness no longer flows in one direction. A team’s attackers borrow from their midfielder and defender teammates and vice-versa, with the relationship becoming a two-way exchange that is influenced by the context and complexity of the match.

In a business context, product development teams mirror the same dynamic. Companies no longer ask only what specialists or generalists can bring to the table. They ask how each profile influences the outcome, how their strengths interact, and how collaboration and incentives turn individual talent into collective performance.

Should managers build teams around deep experts who know one thing better than anyone else, or around flexible generalists who slip across boundaries and connect the dots? And what happens when uncertainty, collaboration demands and incentives begin to pull the strings behind the scenes?

Rather than taking sides, the research shows something more interesting. The answer depends on the type of collaboration the work requires. And it depends on how uncertainty flows through the project. In other words, the question is not “specialists or generalists.” It is “for what environment and under what level of complexity or uncertainty?”

Two very different kinds of teamwork, two very different outcomes

Inside many projects, helping is the default. It is the form of collaboration you see when two engineers jump into each other’s code or two designers finish each other’s mock-ups because deadlines are tight. The work overlaps. Expertise is transferable. Speed and technical mastery matter.

In this setting, specialists shine. Their depth allows them to step in, execute quickly and improve the work directly. Helping functions like putting more capable hands on the same task. It improves expected performance but does not reduce uncertainty. Whatever risk surrounds the project stays exactly where it is.

Other projects, mainly the innovative ones that involve different parts of the project being done by various people/teams and then combining their output as a single outcome, depend on information sharing. This is the kind of collaboration needed when decisions made in one corner of the product ripple into another. One team’s choices about a component affect the constraints of another. Misalignment is expensive. Silence is dangerous.

Here, reducing uncertainty is everything and collaboration can mitigate some of the uncertainty the team faces. The team must synchronise decisions, update assumptions and share what they learn fast. Generalists shine in this space because they work smoothly across boundaries. They help the team understand how one decision connects to another and they prevent incompatibilities that could derail the whole design.

The lesson is clear. Some projects or tasks need helping. Some need information sharing. And the kind of collaboration the project needs has an enormous influence on whether specialists or generalists create more value.

Uncertainty changes everything

Uncertainty behaves like a silent third team member. It elevates some strengths and exposes others.

When uncertainty is high in a helping environment, specialists often win even if their advantage over generalists is small. Their deep knowledge helps reduce risk exposure by performing their individual tasks more precisely. Generalists’ broader skills do not help much because helping does not reduce uncertainty. It only improves expected output. The risk stays.

In information-heavy projects, the pattern reverses. If sharing information can significantly reduce uncertainty, generalists gain the upper hand even when they have much lower task execution abilities. Their behaviour (more specifically, collaboration skills) does not simply improve performance. It prevents missteps. And preventing a misaligned design can be worth far more than perfecting one piece of it.

The surprising insight from the research is that as uncertainty grows, generalists can become more valuable than specialists in certain projects. Not because they perform tasks better, but because they reduce uncertainty better.

The team that reduces part of the uncertainty most effectively becomes the right team.

Incentives are not neutral. They reshape the team

The research shows that incentives do not motivate everyone equally. They interact with team composition in powerful and sometimes counterintuitive ways.

In helping environments, task incentives and collaboration incentives act as substitutes. Specialists receive stronger task incentives because their task ability is central to performance. Their collaboration skills are lower, so raising collaboration incentives is expensive and delivers limited benefit. For generalists, collaboration incentives matter more because they collaborate more effectively by default.

In information-sharing environments, incentives can act as complements rather than substitutes. When specialists’ task abilities are high, but their collaboration skills are only moderately lower, it can be optimal for a company to offer both high task and high collaboration incentives at the same time. These two incentives enhance each other because greater collaboration reduces uncertainty and makes higher task incentives more effective.

But this complementarity appears only in specific conditions where uncertainty can be reduced meaningfully.

If specialists have very low collaboration skills, there is no incentive level high enough to make information sharing efficient for them. In that case, the firm must either hire generalists or accept an incentive design process with higher risk.

The broader takeaway is that incentives shape how teams behave. They reinforce or weaken the strengths of different team members. And the wrong incentive structure can make even the most brilliant expert perform below potential.

The real magic lies in intentional team design

What emerges from the study is a more nuanced, more realistic view of team building.

Specialists are not the natural choice for technically demanding projects. And generalists are not the natural choice for dynamic or uncertain ones. The correct choice depends on the nature of collaboration and whether reducing uncertainty is more valuable than having the best individual output from each team member.  

• Helping favours specialists. Information sharing favours generalists.
• High uncertainty in helping environments strengthens specialists.
• High uncertainty in information-sharing environments strengthens generalists.
• Incentives can substitute or complement, depending entirely on which type of collaboration is more relevant to the project.

This is not a neat formula. It is a strategic lens.

A perfect fit for firms seeking performance they can trust

For organisations that want better teams, the research provides several powerful takeaways:

• When a project involves two people working on overlapping tasks and their interaction doesn’t significantly change the uncertainty of the project, hire specialists and reinforce their task efforts.
• When a project involves multiple interdependent decisions on which their alignment impacts the final performance or the success of the project, hire generalists and reward their collaboration.
• If uncertainty is high but reducible, choose generalists and invest in incentives that strengthen collaboration because it unlocks stronger task performance.
• If uncertainty is high and not reducible, choose the team that can execute through volatility with minimal coordination cost.

Above all, the study encourages companies to stop treating team composition as a personality choice and start treating it as a structural decision. Teams must be composed around the work, the form of collaboration it requires and the nature of the uncertainties it faces.

Just as strikers and midfielders influence each other depending on the context and complexity of the game, specialists and generalists reshape each other’s value inside a team. Understanding these interactions does more than fill a roster. It builds the foundation of a team that performs.

Useful links:

• Link up with Sara Rezaee Vessal and Svenja Sommer on LinkedIn
• Read a related article: 18 minutes, 37 seconds: Surgical Teams
• Discover ESSEC Business School France-Singapore-Morocco
• Apply for the ESSEC Global MBA.

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