When More Is Less: The Role of Social Capital in Managing Talent in Teams

When it comes to talent, managers largely follow the layperson's belief that "more is better." Yet, the sports world offers examples of talented teams performing below expectations and less talented teams outperforming more talented rivals. To explore these alternative views, we first examined the link between star talent and team performance using data from professional soccer teams in top-tier European leagues during the 2017-2018 season. Findings suggest that "more may be less" when it comes to exceptional talent, as teams with several star players often performed worse than teams with fewer talented players. We then explored these diminishing returns using network-level passing data and found that the impact of talent on performance depended on the team's structural social capital configurations. Denser, more decentralized networks favor teams with more talent, while sparser, less centralized networks enable less talented teams to outperform more talented opponents. Deploying optimal social capital configurations can be challenging though, as further analysis of within-match dynamics showed that these configurations are influenced by team talent, exhibit increasing within-match inertia, and may shift in response to unexpected events. Based on these findings we identify new directions for exploring how teams' human and social capital jointly affect their performance.