Literature Search

The purpose and structure of a literature review (IBUS 620 Briefing) A literature review answers the following questions: “What do we already know about a research topic,” and “Where are the gaps in our knowledge of this research topic?” Answering the first question helps us hugely with the second question. Given this, the questions become more like “What do we know,” and “Based on what we know, what more would be useful to know? Literature reviews proceed from general to specific, so they can finish up on talking about the latest knowledge in your specific research question-area. First you need to decide about your research question. Here’s an example research question: What factors determine high-performance teams in firms? Then state a testable hypothesis about the research area: H1: Teams with members having more similar backgrounds outperform teams with less similar backgrounds. Phrased another way: As teams increasingly have members with backgrounds in common, team performance increases. There could be a couple of testable hypotheses; here’s a second one: H2: Teams with greater experience working together outperform teams that have not previously worked together. Once you have come up with a research problem and at least one testable hypothesis, you are ready to search the literature. Go to ABI/Inform, or another Library resource for journal articles, and put in some relevant search terms. Here are some search terms I would start with: Teams, teamwork, high performance teams, cooperation, problem-solving After some searching (I spent some time playing around with the search engine and using these and other keywords), I found this article:

Bendor, Jonathan, Page, Scott E., “Team composition for tool‐based problem solving,” Journal of Economics & Management Strategy. Winter 2019, Vol. 28 Issue 4, p734-764. 31p. I could write in my literature review the following (after reading the paper and/or the abstract): While Bendor and Page (2019) identify some important conditions for teams to perform at a high level, their focus is on decomposable problems, the simplest class of problems. While interesting, their research fails to shed light on complex, non- decomposable or nearly-decomposable problems. The world is full of mostly complex non-decomposable problems, so the utility of this approach is in some doubt. An analysis of high performance teams that deal with highly complex, problems is lacking. Our paper helps to foil in this gap. At the end of the paper (in your case the literature search) I place a reference in the “References” section: References Bendor, Jonathan, Page, Scott E., “Team composition for tool‐based problem solving,” Journal of Economics & Management Strategy. Winter 2019, Vol. 28 Issue 4, p734-764. 31p. In the above example, I have identified a contribution to the field, and also an issue with the contribution that our paper seeks to address. Next, you would look for more specific examples of work addressing problems similar to your research question. Who else has tried to answer your question in the past? Akgün, Ali E. “Team wisdom in software development projects and its impact on project performance” International Journal of Information Management, February 2020, Vol. 50 Issue: Number 1 p228-243. You might then write something like this about the article: Akgün (2020) usefully defines team wisdom, but does not tie that factor to team performance or team attributes such as similarity of team members’ diversity. Our research sheds light on the important area of team diversity and performance. Above, we have again identified an important study that is closest to our research problem, and we specify its main contribution to the literature. We then point out how the study has at least one flaw, and our research addresses this gap in the literature.

For this assignment, finding one “general” paper that broadly covers your research is fine. Then, look for one to three more articles that cover more specific aspects of your research problem. Discuss them and conclude. Here is a sample conclusion to a literature review: While Akgün (2020) has shed important light on the question of “what determines a high performance team?”, he has not looked at optimal composition of teams, and the diversity of their backgrounds. Our study explores how similarity of team members’ backgrounds affects team performance. I’ve kept this short for readability. Your literature review should be longer, as noted above. For further information on literature reviews, please see the sample short literature review provided on the iLearn page. Questions? Email Prof. Heiman