Effect of Team Diversity on Physician Performance and Reputation: Evidence from an Online Healthcare Platform

With the development of the Internet, an increasing number of patients are consulting and solving their health problems via online healthcare platforms. Medical team service is a new cooperative paradigm introduced by online healthcare platforms to cater to the diversified needs of patients. Existing studies have examined the performance of online medical teams at the team level, whereas little attention has been paid to the performance of individual team members. To fill this gap, we perform an empirical study to analyze whether online medical team diversity affects team members’ performance and reputation. Leveraging the data collected from a leading online healthcare platform in China, we employ a fixed-effect model to investigate the impact of online medical team diversity in experience and reputation on physician performance and reputation. The results indicate that both the experience diversity and reputation diversity of online medical teams positively impact team members’ individual service performance. However, interestingly, our results suggest that reputation diversity of online medical teams negatively influences individual reputation and positively influences individual service performance. Meanwhile, our findings indicate that the presence of “superstar physicians” within the team amplifies the positive effect of team experience diversity, though a similar effect is not observed in the context of team reputation diversity. Our study provides valuable insights into the factors influencing physicians’ decisions to join online medical teams and sheds light on strategies to improve the performance and reputation of team members.