Beyond Moneyball to social capital inside and out: The value of differentiated workforce experience ties to performance

The differential impact of social capital among employees in strategic and support roles has received far less attention than that of human capital in talent management literature. Building on network closure theory and differentiated workforce theory, we examine the effect of strategic and support teams’ experience ties on team performance while controlling for human capital using current Moneyball ‐inspired metrics for workforce quality. Using an 111‐year longitudinal data set of 15,837 Major League Baseball players from all 30 teams and 3,475,778 experience ties, we find that after accounting for the effect of team quality, managerial stability and reputation, and era effects, organizational experience ties and subsequent team performance have an inverted U‐shaped relationship for strategic roles and a U‐shaped relationship for support roles. Competitor experience ties have an inverted U‐shaped relationship on performance for strategic roles, yet the hypothesized U‐shaped relationship showed differences for different competency areas among support roles. This study highlights the value of social capital to team performance and the importance of differentiating human resource management (HRM) practices for strategic and support roles in 20 different competency areas. It also showcases how workforce analytics with big data can be applied to HRM and have value added impact on workforce and firm strategy execution.