This Is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University with Talking Management for The Globe & Mail. Today I am delighted to sit down with Columbia Business School professor Adam Galinsky.
Adam, you have a new book Friend & Foe, one of the interesting idea's is that you can have too much talent. Tell us more about that.
ADAM GALINSKY -Well, we think organizations they want more talent, we want more talent, we think more talent is always better, but it turns out more talent is usually good, but often only until a point. And the reason why to understand that you need to think about the tension between cooperation and competition. When we are in a group and we need to coordinate our behaviour let's take, for example, a soccer team or a basketball team. They need to coordinate their behaviour effectively, set each other up, recover on defence and mistakes, and pass the ball well to get people the best shots.
What we found in both soccer and in basketball is when teams get too much talent, their ability to coordinate goes down and their performance goes down. In this case, whenever you need to coordinate behaviour within a team, having too much talent can actually be problematic. Now, why is that? Well, it turns out that when you have too much talent you get what is called status conflicts. You get a fight over who is going to be the alpha person and who is not, and that energy that is geared towards that status contest and that status competition takes away from the coordination and the collaboration from the group and therefore performance goes down. You can see this and sometimes people call this the Galácticos effect.
MOORE – So Adam this makes sense in basketball and soccer, does it apply at work at well?
GALINSKY - Well, let me tell you a little bit about where it doesn't apply in sports, and then we can understand where it applies in the workplace. So there is another sport where there is no coordination that is really required, it's people go in a sequential process and that's baseball. I hit the ball, then you hit the ball, then Maurice hits the ball, and whether I hit the ball isn't going to effect as much whether you get to hit the ball, where is in basketball if I shoot then you can't be shooting. So what we found in baseball is more talent is always better, it is just a straight linear effect.
So when we start to think about that, what do we want in organizations, well really the central question you have to ask is, 'What type of task are we doing?" Are we doing a task where people can independently contribute toward the whole, well then more talent is probably always going to be better. But if you and I need to coordinate our behaviour effectively in a group, then the amount of talent can become too much and then we can get like chickens picking at each other. When there is no pecking order, the group performance will go down. So more talent is always better when people work independently, we can get this too much talent effect when people have to coordinate and work in an independent fashion.