By Andrew C. Loignon
Center for Creative Leadership
Fabio Fonti
NEOMA Business School
Mehdi Bagherzadeh
NEOMA Business School
Andrei Gurca
Queen’s University Belfast
Sirish Shrestha
Center for Creative Leadership
Summary
New research in Academy of Management Discoveries revisits the longstanding “war for talent,” with an eye towards enhancing team effectiveness.
Since the 1990s, leaders have been told that to win the war for talent, they should recruit, select, and retain their star employees at all cost. This “more is better” perspective still dominates today’s organizations.
Rather than indicating that “more is better” when it comes to talent, CCL researchers discovered, based on data from top-flight, professional soccer teams, that adding increasingly more talent to a team provides diminishing returns, which becomes even negative.
Subsequent analyses revealed the value of talent in teams can vary markedly depending on the structural social processes in the teams. By examining the team’s passing networks, the researchers found that it was only when teams adopted a specific structure (i.e., highly and evenly interconnected networks) that more talent was, in fact, better for performance. Other structures tended to still contribute to “diminishing returns” for the teams talent.
Based on these findings, the authors recommend that leaders should:
- Recognize the risk of diminishing returns when managing teams with an abundance of star talent, especially in interdependent settings.
- Shift their focus from solely human capital concerns to include social processes, like who’s collaborating with whom on specific tasks.
- Design and prioritize tasks to align workflows with available human capital for optimal team performance.
- Proactively align social and human capital early, avoid reactive shifts based initial successes or failures, and continuously monitor configurations for sustained performance.
Citation
Loignon, A., Fonti, F., Bagherzadeh, M., Gurca, A., & Shresta, S. (2025). When More is Less: The Role of Social Capital in Managing Talent in Teams. Academy of Management Discoveries.
