What is it about?
Every organization relies on different kinds of teams for successful strategy execution. Using a 111-year longitudinal dataset of all Major League Baseball (MLB) teams from 1903-2013, we show how hitting, pitching and fielding strategic and support team experience ties have an even stronger effect on predicting team winning percentage than does player performance as measured in Wins Above Replacement (WAR). This a powerful and surprising finding especially in MLB where the emphasis on Moneyball-inspired performance metrics is arguably the most prevalent, precise and sophisticated of any industry.
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Why is it important?
Our findings show that both human and social capital matter greatly to team performance and that the ties between strategic and support teams need to be managed differentially for high performance. These results are not just important in professional sports, however; as baseball teams have been favorably compared to teams from high tech to investment banking and from surgical teams and to cockpit crews.
Perspectives
Wang and Cotton see lessons here in helping organizations decide which employees should be in strategic and support roles and when changes to team membership, taking into account social capital, may be warranted. Cotton adds, “The study shows how application of workforce analytics in the social capital arena can improve strategy execution while shedding new light on the importance of examining how individual careers evolve and change over time and the effect this has on team performance, team identity and shared cognition.”
Rick Cotton
University of Victoria
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Beyond Moneyball
to social capital inside and out: The value of differentiated workforce experience ties to performance, Human Resource Management, October 2017, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/hrm.21856.
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