Does the existence of "talented outliers" help improve team performance? Modeling heterogeneous personalities in teamwork

Abstract

Personality heterogeneity is an important topic in team manage-ment. In many working groups, there exists certain type of people that are talented but under-disciplined, who could occasionally make extraordinary con-tributions for the team, but often have less satisfactory overall performance. It is interesting to investigate whether the existence of such people in the team does help improve the overall team performance, and if it does so, what are the conditions for their existence to be positive, and through which channel their benefits for the team are manifested. This study proposes an analytical model with a simple structure that sets up an environment to study these questions. It is shown that: (1) feedback learning could be the mechanism through which outliers' benefits to the team are established, and thus could be a prerequisite for outliers' positive existence; (2) different types of teamwork settings have different outlier-positivity conditions: a uniform round-wise punishment for teamwork failures could be the key idea to encourage outliers' existence; for two specific types of teamwork, teamwork that highlights assistance in inter-actions are more outliers-friendly than teamwork that consists internal compe-titions. These results well match empirical observations and may have further implications for managerial practice.