Robert Huckman, Bradley Staats, and David Upton, all of the Harvard Business School, shed some light on the role of "experience" of individuals comprising work teams and the consequent impact on team peformance. What they find matters most is how much team members have worked with one another, not how long any of them have worked in their respective capacities:

Much of the literature on learning views experience as a unidimensional concept captured by the cumulative production volume or number of projects completed by a team. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that teams are stable in their membership and internal organization. In practice, however, such stability is rare, as the composition and structure of teams often changes over time or between projects. In this paper, we use detailed data from an Indian software services firm to examine how such changes may affect the accumulation of experience within, and the performance of, teams. We find that the level of team familiarity (i.e., the average number of times that each team member has worked with every other member of the team) has a significant and positive effect on performance but that conventional measures of the experience of individual team members (e.g. years at the firm) do not impact performance. We do find, however, that the role experience of individuals in a team (i.e., years in a given role within a team) is associated with better team performance. We examine the impact of role experience separately for team managers and team members. We find that a manager's role experience is positively related to outcome measures that are easily observable in process but is not related to outcomes that are difficult to monitor in process. In comparison, a member's role experience is positively related to both types of outcomes. Our results offer an approach for capturing the experience held by fluid teams and highlight the need to study context-specific measures of experience, including role experience, in addition to offering further insight into how the interactions of team members may contribute to the development of broader firm capabilities.