As the FIFA World Cup kicked off in Brazil this summer, the San Antonio Spurs were polishing off the star-laden Miami Heat to claim the National Basketball Association’s championship trophy — the fifth championship in franchise history. Consensus was the Spurs’ dazzling display of team basketball was simply too much for the Heat’s “Big Three” of LeBron James, Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade to overcome.
The outcome may not be that surprising given new research from Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, that suggests there is such a thing as having too much talent on a sports team. The forthcoming research indicates that, after a certain point, the addition of more superstar talent to a team can actually be detrimental, resulting in poorer team performance.
The study, conducted by social scientists at Columbia University, France’s INSEAD business school and Amsterdam’s VU University, analyzed data from soccer, basketball and baseball to determine the connections between star talent, teamwork and success. The research indicates that the too-much-talent effect only emerges in sports that require a high level of interdependence between players. For more individualistic sports, such as baseball, very high levels of talent do
not seem to hurt performance.
The research was conducted using data from the FIFA World Cup 2010 and 2014 qualifying periods and the 2002-2012 NBA and Major League Baseball seasons. The researchers identified individual talent using individual elite club affiliations in football, estimated wins added (EWA) in basketball, and wins above replacement (WAR) in baseball. This, along with an unparalleled amount of information, including on-court intrateam coordination data, allowed measurement of team performance in relation to the amount of talent on the books.
Talent vs. teamwork
The research showed that the presence of too many individuals with top talent can undermine players’ willingness to coordinate, which can compromise effective teamwork and overall team performance.
Can the same hold true for the building strong teams in the business world? The answer seems to be yes. As in the sports world, however, the “too much talent” dilemma primarily affects business teams that rely on a high level of interdependence between team members. If that’s
the case, sales, which is generally viewed as an independent endeavor, may actually benefit from stacking up superstar talent.
“For teams requiring high levels of interdependence, like football and basketball, talent facilitates team performance, but only up to a point,” says INSEAD Professor Roderick Swaab. “Beyond this point, the benefits of adding more top talent will decrease and eventually hurt the team performance because they fail to coordinate their actions.
“Like sports teams, teams in organizations vary in their levels of interdependence. When team success merely depends on the accumulation of individual performance (e.g. sales teams), hiring and staffing could simply focus on getting the most talented individuals on board,” Swaab says. “However, these same strategies can hurt a willingness to coordinate effectively when team success depends on high levels of interdependence (e.g. strategy teams). When interdependence between team members is high, organizations could either hire a better mix of top talent and non-top talent and/or invest more in training to formalize roles, ranks, and responsibilities.”
