Communications of the ACM
Can Too Much Talent Harm Your Team's Performance?
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Every organization wants to hire the best of the best, but research from Columbia Business School shows that teams with the most talent don't always net the best results.
Professor Adam Galinsky, the Vikram S. Pandit Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, examined a variety of team-based situations — including egg-production in a chicken coop as well as 10 seasons of professional basketball and baseball — and concluded that when a team is filled with top-notch talent, overall performance actually goes down.
"If a team does not have a clear pecking order, status conflict and chaos emerges, and as a result the overall performance goes down because coordination goes down," says Professor Galinsky. "Overall, our findings suggest that team coordination suffers when there is too much talent, because team members all try to be the alpha."
The takeaway for hiring managers is this:
- If you require a team where members must join forces, such as a basketball team, then hiring a range of talent levels will generate the greatest success.
- But if you require a team where individuals do not need to coordinate and are able to work individually, such as a baseball team, then hiring the best of the best is a great strategy.
The research is described in "The Too-Much-Talent Effect: Team Interdependence Determines When More Talent Is Too Much or Not Enough," published in the journal Psychological Science. The article is co-authored by Roderick I. Swaab and Michael Schaerer of INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France, Richard Ronay of Vrije University, Amsterdam, and Eric M. Anicich and Adam D. Galinsky, Columbia University.
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