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Talent: Too much or too little depends on the kind of team

Publish date: July 21, 2015

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There is no “I” in TEAM

Mr. Swaab and his colleagues hypothesized the “too-much-talent effect” and found that talent often facilitates team performance, but only up to a point. They report that the relationship between talent and performance is not linear and monotonic. In contrast, they found that the relationship in football and basketball eventually turns negative (Psychol. Science 2014;25;1581-91). We have all heard the phrase, “There is no ‘I’ in team,” and it is clear that in certain sports, a team is necessary. No single cyclist can win the Tour de France without a strong team of support, and a soccer striker who is arrogant and feels he or she can score alone will fail to pass to the open teammate time and time again. We have all seen this strategy fail to result in a win. In contrast, one role of the midfielder in soccer is to provide selfless service to the striker – for the benefit of the team.

The cardiothoracic surgery world that we all work in can benefit from the findings reported by Swaab and colleagues. The individual with the “talent” in the cardiothoracic surgery realm – the skilled surgeon – may not be the best at building teams that work well together, and putting together several talented surgeons does not make an outstanding surgical team. Surgeons are not trained to be leaders, team builders, or to model collaborative behavior. A good leader requires emotional intelligence to be aware of others around her and of the successes and failures of the team. Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson found that the most productive, innovative teams were led by people who were both task- and relationship-oriented and that these leaders changed their style during the project (Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams, Harvard Bushiness Review, November 2007). Their findings were similar to those reported by Mr. Swaab and his colleagues in that they also found that the greater the proportion of highly educated specialists on a team, the more likely the team is to disintegrate into unproductive conflicts.

If we wish to establish world-renowned service lines or surgical programs, we would be well served by understanding that a great team requires collaboration, cohesion, and diversity. Diversity not only in talent but also in background and experiences. In addition, surgeon leaders cannot score all of the goals alone; they need an integrated, cohesive, diverse, and collaborative team to provide excellent patient care.

Dr. Jennifer S. Lawton is a professor of surgery at the division of cardiothoracic surgery, Washington University, St. Louis. She is also an associate medical editor for Vascular Specialist.

FROM PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

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Talent facilitates team performance, but only up to a point, depending on the type of team. For highly interdependent teams, there is a threshold where the benefits of more talent decrease and eventually become detrimental rather than beneficial, according to an analysis of five studies performed by Roderick I. Swaab and his colleagues.

Surveys across industries and countries show that organizations consider talent attraction is their top priority, presumably based on the belief that more talent is better and the relationship between talent and team performance is linear and monotonic, they stated in Psychological Science (2014;25:1581-91)

The researchers analyzed the results of five studies they performed to investigate this relationship, comparing the impact of talent on team performance in the highly interdependent sports soccer (World Cup performance) and basketball (NBA), compared with the less interdependent sport of baseball (MLB).

In the case of soccer, team performance data were based on the average Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) rankings of national teams during the 2010 and 2014 World Cup qualification periods. Top talent was assessed by dividing the team’s numbers of players in each national team active in one of the world’s elite clubs divided by the total number of players on the national team.

In the case of the NBA, top talent was determined using the individual players’ estimated wins added (EWA) as determined over a 10-year period (2002-2012), with an index determining whether a player was in the top one-third (1) or not (0). Team performance was measured using each team’s end-of-year win percentage.

For baseball, top talent was determined using a player’s wins above replacement statistic (WAR), which is the number of wins a player contributes relative to a freely available minor-league player. Team performance was measured using each team’s win percentage.

In their results, basketball and soccer, the two most interdependent of the three sports, both showed a significant quadratic effect in which top talent benefited performance only up to a point, after which the marginal benefit of talent decreased and turned negative.

These results were in contrast to those seen with baseball. “As we predicted, the effect of top talent never turned negative in baseball, a sport in which task interdependence is relatively low. Thus there was no too-much-talent effect in baseball unlike in football [soccer] and basketball” according to the researchers.

“We predict that the too-much-talent effect will be found in other organizational contexts as well,” they added.

“Just as a colony of high-performing chickens competing for dominance suffers decrements in overall egg production and increases in bird mortality, teams with too much talent appear to divert attention away from coordination as team members peck at each other in their attempts to establish intergroup standing. In many cases, too much talent can be the seed of failure,” Mr. Swaab and his colleagues concluded.

The authors all declared that they had no conflicts of interest relative to the paper.

mlesney@frontlinemedcom.com

Talent: Too much or too little depends on the kind of team

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