Assign and Appraise: Achieving Optimal Performance in Collaborative Teams

Tackling complex team problems requires understanding each team member’s skills in order to devise a task assignment maximizing the team performance. This article proposes a novel quantitative model describing the decentralized process by which individuals in a team learn who has what abilities, while concurrently assigning tasks to each of the team members. In the model, the appraisal network represents team members’ evaluations of one another, and each team member chooses their own workload. The appraisals and workload assignment change simultaneously: each member builds their own local appraisal of neighboring members based on the performance exhibited on previous tasks, while the workload is redistributed based on the current appraisal estimates. We show that the appraisal states can be reduced to a lower dimension due to the presence of conserved quantities associated with the cycles of the appraisal network. Building on this, we provide rigorous results characterizing the ability, or inability, of the team to learn each other’s skills and, thus, converge to an allocation maximizing the team performance. We complement our analysis with extensive numerical experiments.