Alex Bryson and colleagues use US baseball data to investigate whether performance suffers if there is too wide a gap between the skills of a team's stars and the rest.skill dispersion, baseball, firm performance

Alex Bryson

Kerry L. Papps

Rafael Gomez

English

Research Papers in Economics

CentrePiece Summer 2011
22
I
n a team-based enterprise, is
output maximised by attracting
individuals with the largest
aggregate endowment of skills
without regard to their effect
on the distribution of skills
within the team? Phil Jackson, former
coach of US basketball team the Chicago
Bulls and one of professional sport’s most
successful managers, illustrates the
importance of this question: 
‘The real reason the Bulls won six NBA
championships in nine years is that we
plugged into the power of oneness
instead of the power of one man. Sure,
we had Michael Jordan, and you have to
credit his talent. But at the other end of
the spectrum, if players 9, 10, 11, and 12
are unhappy because Michael takes 25
shots a game, their negativity is going to
undermine everything. It doesn’t matter
how good individual players are – they
can’t compete with a team that is awake
and aware and trusts each other.’
Our research asks whether there is an
optimal spread of talent that maximises
performance. Specifically, we consider
whether it is optimal for managers to
assemble teams solely on the basis of
average ability (irrespective of the effect
this may have on the distribution of skills)
or whether organisations should manage
selection so as to prevent too wide a gap
opening up between the best and poorest
performers.
Our analysis is based on annual
performance and biographical data from
the history of US major league baseball,
1920-2009. As individual performance
measures, we use earned run average
(ERA) for pitchers and on-base plus
slugging percentage (OPS) for hitters. A
low ERA or a high OPS indicates a good
player.
In baseball terms, the question we
want to answer is if the manager is forced
to choose two players whose average
ability is the same (for example, a
combined historical batting average of
0.275), is it better to approximate the
average more closely (0.270 and 0.280
respectively) or should one star (0.325)
and one less able player (0.225) be hired?
And at what point would too large or too
narrow a spread in ability be damaging to
team chemistry and performance?
As might be expected, our research
shows that teams with higher average
talent are more successful: the
higher/lower the average OPS/ERA of the
players, the greater the winning
percentage of the team. More surprisingly,
we find that baseball teams assembled at
Talent is essential for team success in any
setting – but is performance harmed if there is
too wide a gap between the skills of an
organisation’s stars and the rest? Alex Bryson
and colleagues analyse data on US major league
baseball to investigate how the distribution of a
team’s talent affects its overall performance.
Team performance 
and the optimal spread of
talent: evidence from 
US major league baseballCentrePiece Summer 2011
23
the start of a season with either too large
or too small a degree of inequality in OPS
or ERA underperform relative to teams
with more intermediate skill distributions.
In other words, there is the inverse U-
shaped pattern depicted in Figure 1,
where skill dispersion and team output are
positively related up to region A-B, after
which, in the region of high skill
dispersion, B-C, the relationship turns
negative. The implication is that a team’s
winning percentage is not highest where
skill dispersion is highest, but rather at
point B, where heterogeneous ability is
moderate.
These findings suggest that teams
with a healthy balance of stars and players
on their way to becoming stars (and
perhaps even older players with declining
productivity but who provide experience)
The idea of 
an optimal
distribution 
of ability is
relevant in
any setting
where output
depends on
teamwork
Figure 1:
Hypothetical relationship between skill dispersion and team performance
HIGH
A
B
Linear
hypothesis
Non-linear
hypothesis
C
LOW HIGH
T
e
a
m
 
o
u
t
p
u
t
Skill dispersion
C
outperform teams with extremely equal or
extremely unequal skill distributions. Yet
most teams have levels of inequality
greater than the estimated optimum,
implying that they would benefit from a
reduction in skill dispersion. 
What might explain the inverse 
U-shaped pattern? Below a certain level of
heterogeneity, we contend that players do
not benefit from the assistance and
motivation resulting from playing
alongside teammates with complementary
skills and greater talent. Beyond a certain
level of heterogeneity, however, further
increases in the variance of talent can
allow opposing teams to exploit the
weaknesses of lower-performing players.
This could be the case if better players
are either unwilling to help their
teammates or if they are simply unable toCentrePiece Summer 2011
24
This article summarises ‘Heterogeneous
Worker Ability and Team-based Production:
Evidence from Major League Baseball, 1920-
2009’ by Alex Bryson, Kerry Papps and Rafael
Gomez, CEP Discussion Paper No. 1015
(http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/
dp1015.pdf) and just published in Labour
Economics 18: 310-19.
Alex Bryson of the National Institute of
Economic and Social Research is a visiting
research fellow in CEP’s labour markets
programme. Kerry Papps is a fellow of
Nuffield College, Oxford. Rafael Gomez is at
the University of Toronto and was a research
associate in CEP’s now completed programme
on the future of trade unions.
do so because the talent gap is too wide.
And while baseball is more a game of
individuals and requires less on-the-field
interaction than sports like basketball and
football, team performance still depends
in large measure on who precedes or
follows a player in the pitching rotation or
batting order.
Baseball players are often called on to
make ‘sacrifices’ by their managers so that
other players will profit and the team will
succeed. For example, a hitter might be
told to tire an opposing pitcher out by
‘fouling off’ balls or a pitcher might be
asked to ‘walk’ a hitter intentionally. We
believe that such self-sacrificing behaviour
is strengthened by having skill distributions
that are neither too wide nor too narrow. 
Can these results be generalised
beyond baseball? We believe that
wherever workers have to perform their
tasks in a setting where there is a single
product or ultimate output measure, the
idea of an optimal distribution of worker
ability is likely to be relevant even if, as in
baseball, workers may be co-operating
only indirectly. Such work environments
are common and include areas as diverse
as consultancy, academic departments,
complex legal cases, film sets, space
missions and most restaurants. 
The task of a manager in these
settings is not simply to hire individual
workers with the best talent money can
buy or to hire a star and allow the rest of
a team to catch up. Rather, it is as
important to look at the effect that hiring
someone will have on the dispersion of
ability. In cases where work is highly
interdependent and resources for the firm
are constrained, it may even be best to
look at distributional concerns first and
absolute ability second.
Our findings reinforce what good
organisations seem to do every day: select
the best group of workers possible and
harness their collective potential by being
as attentive to the distribution of skills as
In large
organisations,
a surfeit of star
talent may
prevent the
formation of a
well-functioning
team
to the average ability. But an obvious
question is why, just as in many of the
baseball teams in our sample, so many
organisations fail to attain the ideal
distribution of talent?
In small organisations or teams, this
may be because managers are simply
unable to acquire the best talent: they may
have a workforce with a very similar range
of ability but not enough star talent to pull
up overall production. Conversely, in large
firms with few limitations on finding and
developing the best staff, a surfeit of star
talent may prevent the formation of a well-
functioning team.
Baseball teams with too large
or too small a spread of talent
underperform relative to
teams with intermediate 
skill distributions

Team performance and the optimal spread of talent

http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cp344.pdf

Team performance and the optimal spread of talent

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