The study found that the presence of too many top talented individuals can undermine players’ willingness to coordinate, which is required for effective teamwork and performance.

However, findings from the research also reveal that most people assume the opposite, believing that piling on more top talent is the key to team success. “Most people believe that the relationship between talent and team performance is linear – the more their team is packed with talent, the better they will do,” explains Swaab. “Yet our latest research documenting a ‘too-much-talent effect’, reveals that for teams requiring high levels of interdependence, like football and basketball, talent facilitates team performance… but only up to a point,” he says. “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.”

Swaab’s findings relate to the sport field the same way as they can be taken into account for the boardroom. “Like sports teams, teams in organizations vary in their levels of interdependence,” he states. When team success merely depends on the accumulation of individual performances as it is the case with sales teams for example, hiring and staffing could simply focus on getting the most talented individuals on board. However, these same strategies can hurt a willingness to coordinate effectively when team success depends on high levels of interdependence as it is the case with strategy teams for example. He recommends therefore that when interdependence between team members is high, organizations should either hire a better mix of top talent and non-top talent or invest more in training to formalize roles, ranks, and responsibilities.

http://www.insead.edu/facultyresearch/faculty/profiles/rswaab/