Team Makes You Better: Evidence from Online Medical Consultation Platforms

Virtual teamwork has become a prevalent mode of collaboration. However, scant empirical attention has been given to the impact of virtual teamwork on individual members’ performance beyond the team setting. In this paper, we fill this gap by studying virtual teams in the context of online medical consultation (OMC) platforms. Specifically, we collect data from two OMC platforms during a time period when both platforms offered individual consultations (i.e., one patient connected with one physician) but only one offered team consultations (i.e., one patient connected with a team of physicians). Using a difference-in-difference-in-differences approach, we find that team participation has a robust, positive effect on physicians’ performance in individual consultations. We further explore the potential mechanisms through which team participation improves physicians’ performance. The empirical results indicate that the observed performance improvement is likely driven by peer effects in team settings. In particular, we find that physicians exert more effort in individual consultations after joining a team and that performance improvement is stronger when (1) a physician can easily observe the performance of the physician’s teammates (peers), (2) a physician has teammates (peers) who perform well in individual consultations, (3) a physician has teammates (peers) from the same hospital or the same city, or (4) a physician has a lower performance prior to joining in a team. Our findings shed new light on the boundary-spanning roles of virtual teams and provide timely insights into the ongoing development of OMC platforms.