Strategic Core v3 - Pennsylvania State University Morgeson...strategic core of teams that suggests that certain subsets of a team are most important for team performance and that the

A Theory of the Strategic Core 1

Running head: A theory of the strategic core

Developing a Theory of the Strategic Core:

The Contribution of Core and Non-Core Roles to Team Performance

Stephen E. Humphrey Department of Management

Florida State University Tallahassee, FL 32306-1110

Voice: (850) 644-1138 Fax: (850) 644-7843

[email protected]

Frederick P. Morgeson The Eli Broad Graduate School of Management

Michigan State University N475 North Business Complex East Lansing, MI 48824-1122

Voice: (517) 432-3520 Fax: (517) 432-1111 [email protected]

Michael J. Mannor

The Eli Broad Graduate School of Management Michigan State University

N475 North Business Complex East Lansing, MI 48824-1122

Voice: (517) 432-0199 Fax: (517) 432-1111 [email protected]


Developing a Theory of the Strategic Core: The Contribution of Core and Non-Core Roles to Team Performance

ABSTRACT

Although numerous models of team performance have been articulated over the past 20 years,

little attention has been paid to the relative importance of different roles within a team. Drawing

from theories in strategic management and organizational theory, we develop a theory of the

strategic core of teams that suggests that certain subsets of a team are most important for team

performance and that the characteristics of the role holders in the “core” of the team are more

strongly related to overall team performance. We test this theory with teams drawn from 29 years

of Major League Baseball (for a total sample of 778 teams). Our results demonstrate that career

experience, team experience, experience in challenging situations, and task ability each

independently predict team performance and together explain 28% of the variance in team

performance. Moreover, we found significantly stronger relationships between these constructs

and team performance when they are possessed by core role holders as opposed to non-core role

holders. These results suggest that teams can be subdivided into core and non-core subsets and

the characteristics of these subsets differentially relate to performance.


Developing a Theory of the Strategic Core: The Contribution of Core and Non-Core Roles to Team Performance

Over the past 20 years, scholars have forwarded numerous models of team performance

(Hackman, 1987; Sundstrom, de Meuse, and Futrell, 1990; Campion, Medsker, and Higgs,

1993), helping us understand why some teams are more successful than others. Interestingly,

these models have paid little attention to the relative importance of different roles within the

team. This is unfortunate because scholars in other areas of organizational research acknowledge

that some members of an organization and some roles within the organization are more critical to

performance than others (Thompson, 1967; Emery and Trist, 1969; Peteraf, 1993; Delery and

Shaw, 2001), in part because individuals in these roles are directly responsible for the firm’s core

competencies and thus make a disproportionate contribution to organizational success.

It also seems possible that some roles within the team are more important to the success

of the team. We seek to investigate this possibility in three ways. First, we develop a theory of

the strategic core of teams by drawing from a variety of literatures that highlight the

disproportionate importance of certain groups or individuals within larger groupings or

collectives. Second, drawing from individual differences psychology, we examine how certain

past experiences and task ability can lead to superior team performance. Finally, we integrate

strategic core theory with individual differences psychology to examine how the past experiences

and task abilities of core and non-core role holders differentially contribute to overall team

performance. We then test our hypotheses in an archival study of team performance.

UNDERSTANDING THE STRATEGIC CORE

Many theories in the strategic management and organizational theory literatures highlight

how subsets of a larger collective are critically important to the overall performance of the

collective, where a collective is any “interdependent and goal-directed combination of


individuals, groups, departments, organizations, or institutions” (Morgeson and Hofmann, 1999,

p. 251). Although not always explicitly identified as such, they all rely on the notion of a

strategic core.

At the organizational level, a variety of theories have identified the strategic value of

specific subsets of an organization. One example is the resource-based view of the firm (Barney,

1986; Peteraf, 1993), which suggests that certain resources controlled by a firm can lead to

sustainable above industry profits, thereby providing the firm with a competitive advantage. For

example, Miller and Shamsie (1996) demonstrated that both knowledge-based resources (i.e.,

information possessed by certain employees) and property-based resources (i.e., exclusive, long-

term contracts with certain actors) created competitive advantage for certain Hollywood movie

studios. Although these strategic core resources only contributed a small subset of the

organization’s total stock of available resources, they were critical to the success of the firm.

Overall success was largely determined by the characteristics of these few strategic resources

even though many resources were required for the continued operation of the organization.

In a similar argument, Prahalad and Bettis (1986) suggested that the top management of

an organization often develops a “dominant logic” that helps them maximize performance in

their “core” businesses. The core competencies of the firm (i.e., the things that a company does

best) serve to both direct and encourage firm growth and return profits to the firm (Prahalad and

Hamel, 1990). By focusing on a few specific core competencies, which typically reflect a small

but strategic subset of the firm’s total set of competencies, the organization can become a

specialist in these areas. This allows the organization to be able to capture the benefits of

specialization, where they can become efficient and effective in their core business. Ultimately,

the firm’s performance in these few core competencies then drives overall firm performance.


A third example of the relevance of a strategic core comes from Thompson’s (1967)

notion of the “technical core” of an organization. In his attempts to understand the nature of

problems in organizations, he adopted Parsons (1960) three distinct levels of responsibility and

control – technical, managerial, and institutional. As opposed to the managerial and institutional

functions, the technical function refers to those organizational tasks that produce organizational

output, whether that is the line workers at an automobile plant, the professors at a university, or

consultants at a service firm. Building on this foundation, he described how the managerial and

institutional levels of the organization primarily served to insulate and buffer the technical core

from uncertainty. Ultimately, it was this technical core, and an organization’s ability to

effectively protect and insulate this technical core, that was proposed to be most important to the

success of the firm. In this way, it was a strategic subset of the broader organization – the

technical core – that drove firm performance.

In other cases, researchers have developed theories that not only identify core subsets, but

that also suggest ways to maximize the value of the collective by properly exploiting these

subsets. For example, Delery and Shaw (2001) extended the notion of strategic core resources to

the workers inside an organization. They suggested that high performance is not necessary from

all members of an organization in order for it to be successful. Rather, they argued that success

in a strategic core of the work force can produce and maintain above industry profits. Drawing

from Prahalad and Hamel (1990), they further suggested that it is the strategic core of the

organization that actually drives the core competencies of the firm. These employees possess the

knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) to produce sustainable competitive advantage in these

firms. More specifically, the combination of KSAs possessed by these employees is unique to the

organization, inimitable, and non-substitutable (Miller and Shamsie, 1996; Barney and Wright,


1998). They provide the organization with the ability to better perform organizational tasks

through the leveraging of these KSAs.

EXTENDING THE STRATEGIC CORE TO TEAMS

Role Theory and the Strategic Core

Although residing at the organizational level, the reviewed research conveys a similar

message: certain subsets of a larger collective are critically important to the performance of that

collective. This previous research has focused on how broad organizational capabilities impact

organizational performance. This neglects the team level, which is unfortunate given the frequent

use of teams in organizations (Devine et al., 1999), the significant impact teams can have on

organizational behavior (Hackman, 1987), and the value of meso- level theorizing (House,

Rousseau, and Thomas-Hunt, 1995). We suggest that teams are also likely to have subsets that

possess unique capabilities that differentially contribute to a team’s performance. Drawing from

the previously reviewed literature on the strategic core, we expect that specific subsets within

teams (i.e., the strategic core) are more valuable than other subsets and have a stronger influence

on a team’s performance.

Role theory (Katz and Kahn, 1978; Biddle, 1979) may help explain how some roles

within a team may become more important to a team’s success. According to role theory, a role

consists of “those behaviors characteristic of one or more persons in a context” (Biddle, 1979, p.

58) which contain numerous tasks, some of which are beyond the formal description of the job

(Ilgen and Hollenbeck, 1991). Roles are embedded within a social system where several roles are

interdependent and performance is a function of the interaction between the roles.

For over fifty years, researchers have been interested in the content of the roles necessary

for team success. In this time, there have been a number of theories and typologies describing


team roles. Although these theories argue that there are anywhere between four (Parker, 1990)

and twenty-seven (Benne and Sheats, 1948) roles that are necessary for team functioning, these

roles can be organized around two primary dimensions: task-oriented and relationship-oriented

roles (Benne and Sheats, 1948; Bales, 1950; Belbin, 1993; Mudrack and Farrell, 1994; Mudrack

and Farrell, 1995; Senior, 1997; Fisher, Hunter, and Macrosson, 1998; Stewart, Fulmer, and

Barrick, in press). Task-oriented roles reflect the performance of specific behaviors that move

the team towards goal and task completion. Relationship-oriented roles reflect behaviors focused

on regulating and maintaining a team’s existence. Given our focus on team performance in

developing the idea of a strategic core of a team, we focus primarily on task-oriented roles when

determining if a role is considered core within a team.

Understanding the Strategic Core

There are at least three reasons why some team roles are more likely to be central or core

within a team than other roles. First, a particular role can be more core than other roles if it has a

greater exposure to the tasks that the team is performing. In effect, some role holders may have

greater responsibilities within the team (Moon et al., 2004). For example, a team may have four

roles that need to be filled. In one role, a team member may be responsible for handling over

50% of the work, whereas the other three roles together are responsible for less than 50% of the

total work. Thus, the heavily loaded task-oriented role is core to the team’s performance.

Second, one role may encounter more of the problems (i.e., variance in socio-technical

terms) that need to be overcome for successful team performance (Emery and Trist, 1969;

Barker, 1993). If these problems are not overcome, the work of the rest of the team may be

affected. For example, in many production and service teams, interacting with and addressing

customer complaints is essential for a team’s success and continued viability. The most


important problems the team will face (e.g., failure to meet customer requirements, missed

deadlines, and so on) have their origin in the customer base. As such, having highly capable team

members filling this role is essential for the team’s success. If this role is not performed

successfully and the problems emanating from the customer base are not adequately addressed,

the entire team will fail. Thus, the role responsible for this work will be more core to the team’s

performance.

Third, team performance is a function of a set of interdependent task roles (Belbin, 1993).

Any number of people can fill a team role. However, according to role theory (Biddle, 1979),

when fewer people in the team fill any role, that role is considered more unique and thus is of

greater value to the team. The reason for this is that, at its extreme, with only one person filling a

role, the responsibility for role performance falls upon how the single role-holder actually

performs. Thus, this role is more central to the team’s performance and likely to

disproportionately effect how the team ultimately performs, particularly if no other role can

substitute for the performance of the unique role holder (Marks, Mathieu, and Zaccaro, 2000).

TEAM MEMBER EXPERIENCE AND ABILITY:

THE RAW MATERIAL OF TEAM ROLE PERFORMANCE

The preceding discussion made the distinction between core and non-core roles within a

team by focusing on the general roles performed by different team members. Left unanswered,

however, is what enables team members to effectively perform these roles. As noted, roles are

simply patterns of behaviors (Biddle, 1979). Because team performance is composed of the

coordinated behavior of individual team members (Weick, 1979), it is necessary to understand

what enables a team (and specifically the team members performing the roles) to behave in

certain ways. Research has noted that the behavior and performance of the team is influenced by


the composition of its members (e.g., Kim, 1997; LePine et al., 1997; Littlepage, Robison, and

Reddington, 1997; Barrick et al., 1998; Humphrey et al., 2002; LePine, 2003). Moreover, recent

research has suggested that the characteristics of role holders influences role behaviors (Stewart,

Fulmer, and Barrick, in press). Two particularly important influences are the range of past

experiences team members have had and the ability a team member has to effectively perform

the tasks associated with his or her individual role. This importance is reflected in past research,

such that these constructs are two of the most heavily studied predictors of individual

performance (Hunter and Hunter, 1984; Quiñones, Ford, and Teachout, 1995). In the following

two sections, we will first describe how these team-level composition characteristics impact team

performance. Following this, we will then integrate the strategic core theory with our

composition hypotheses.

Experience is a multifaceted construct (Quiñones, Ford, and Teachout, 1995) that can

impact performance either directly or indirectly. The direct effect derives from the task-relevant

knowledge that individuals can gain via experience at a particular task (Schmidt, Hunter, and

Outerbridge, 1986). This knowledge can then be directly applied to future task performance, as it

relates to a person’s ability to efficiently and accurately perform the task. That is, through

experience, people learn the easiest way to perform a task, what to avoid when performing the

task, or whom the person needs to work with to perform the task. The indirect effect occurs

because the knowledge gained through experience can be shared, such that more experienced

team members can help less experienced members learn to perform better in their job (i.e.,

experienced team members transfer their knowledge on efficient and accurate task performance

to less experienced team members). Despite the fact that experience can have these effects, the

research literature has tended to focus on a limited set of work experience constructs.


Fortunately, recent research has helped expand our conception of work experience (Tesluk and

Jacobs, 1998), suggesting that there are at least three aspects of experience that are important for

team success.

Career Experience

Career experience has been investigated at both the individual (Lance and Bennett, 2000)

and team levels (Gladstein, 1984). Career experience can be thought of as the length of time

spent in a specific field and the number of times tasks have been performed in that field (Tesluk

and Jacobs, 1998). In general, career experience contributes to individual team member

performance through its development of expertise and knowledge about the job or role (see

Schmidt, Hunter, and Outerbridge, 1986). Higher levels of career experience among team

members help team performance in two ways. First, as team members have higher levels of

career experience, they have greater knowledge of how to most efficiently and effectively

perform the team task (i.e., the development of tacit knowledge about the job, Berman, Down,

and Hill, 2002). Tacit knowledge reflects information acquired free from direct instruction and

leads to the difference between below average and above average performers (Wegner, 1986).

For example, it might reflect an individual team member’s development of short cuts for their

work or another’s knowledge of how to best structure their work. If these people were to perform

individually, they would be able to draw only on their own experiences to help them perform

tasks. However, when these people are put into a team, the team members can share the

knowledge that their experiences have created amongst each other. Thus, the team benefits when

any one individual ga ins job knowledge through greater career experience.

Second, higher levels of career experience will make it more likely that members of the

team know how to respond when infrequently occurring events occur. Once again, individual


team members may have had a number of unique experiences outside of this specific team that

has resulted in the development of tacit knowledge. By tapping into and drawing from the

collective experience, however, the team will be able to formulate an appropriate response to the

infrequently occurring event. This suggests that teams that have an overall higher level of career

experience will be better performers.

H1: Teams with overall higher levels of career experience will have higher levels of team performance.

Experience in Challenging Situations

Experience in challenging situations represents the quality and richness of experience,

rather than just the quantity (Tesluk and Jacobs, 1998). Compared to the quantitative aspects of

experience, this aspect of experience has not been extensively studied. A challenging situation

generally is one in which there is a high level of responsibility or one that involves behavioral

change (McCauley et al., 1994). That is, they are generally “high-stakes” situations, where there

is external pressure to perform in a situation where success and failure are obvious.

These types of situations provide both the opportunity and motivation to learn (Berlew

and Hall, 1966; McCauley et al., 1994). In terms of opportunity, challenging situations provide a

context in which trying new behaviors or rethinking current processes is both appropriate and

necessary (McCauley et al., 1994). That is, challenging situations may be novel, ambiguous, or

provide immediate feedback from highly demanding work, all of which allow for new or

different ways to go about performing work. Thus, teams performing in challenging situations

should have the opportunity to refine their behavioral patterns in order to maximize performance.

In addition, challenging situations produce the motivation for a team to learn. As teams

work together longer in routine situations, they tend to develop self-reinforcing norms for

performance (Gersick and Hackman, 1990; Ancona and Chong, 1996). These norms aid their


ability to perform in routine situations; however, they hinder their ability to adapt to new

situations (Bettenhausen and Murnighan, 1985; Kim, 1997). Performing in challenging situations

forces teams to work in non-routine and stressful contexts. As adaptation is one of the key team

processes (Ilgen et al., 2005) and failure to break routines and adapt to new situations leads to

failure (Moon et al., 2004), challenging situations should serve to motivate teams to learn and

lead to higher performance.

H2: Teams with overall higher levels of experience in challenging situations will have higher levels of team performance.

Team Experience

Team experience is the most well studied team-level experience construct. It represents

the quantity of time continuously spent with the current team. Team experience should facilitate

team performance in three ways. First, as team members have greater experience with the team,

they are able to develop shared mental models and a transactive memory reflecting the dispersion

of skills within the team and each other’s role within the team (Kim, 1997). In essence, a mental

model is the collection of shared information amongst team members (Mohammed and

Dumville, 2001). Teams that possess shared mental models tend to perform better, as they

display better coordination and backing up behaviors (Mathieu et al., 2000; Marks et al., 2002).

Second, greater experience can lead to higher levels of transactive memory. Whereas

shared mental models represent only the knowledge shared by all team members, transactive

memory reflects both the knowledge possessed by individual team members and the awareness

of who possesses that knowledge (Wegner, 1986; Austin, 2003). That is, transactive memory

represents knowledge about who in the team has specific knowledge. With increased experience,

teams form a consensus on who possesses specific knowledge (Bunderson, 2003), the

redundancy of the knowledge across the team, and the volume of knowledge actually possessed.


This self-knowledge allows the team to efficiently tap relevant knowledge when necessary (often

to perform aspects of tasks that some members of the team cannot perform, Berman, Down, and

Hill, 2002), producing high levels of performance (Austin, 2003; Lewis, 2003a).

Third, as individuals increase in experience with others in the team, they are likely to

learn more about each others’ roles. This understanding is likely to produce a greater

understanding of one’s own role and how one’s own role fits in with others. This should

positively impact team performance (Abramis, 1994) because they can more effectively

communicate what each member contributes to the team (Salas et al., 1999) and what is expected

of them in return (Seers, Petty, and Cashman, 1995). That is, the team will determine which roles

are filled by each team member (Tuckman, 1965), leading to effective team performance. This

suggests that higher levels of overall team experience will be related to higher performance.

H3: Teams with overall higher levels of team experience will have higher levels of team performance.

Task Ability

In addition to these different aspects of experience, the ability of team members plays an

important role in team performance. Ability can be conceptualized as both general cognitive

ability and more specific task ability, with each component explaining comparable independent

variance in performance (Morgeson, Delaney-Klinger, and Hemingway, 2005). Most research on

team ability has focused on general cognitive ability. For example, Barrick et al. (1998) found

that general cognitive ability in a team increased performance and team viability. However,

research on teams has not adequately examined the role of specific task ability on team

performance.

As noted by Sundstrom, de Meuse, and Futrell (1990), most teams require experts in a

specialized area who are both knowledgeable of and skilled at performing specific tasks. As


opposed to general cognitive ability, which affects performance through its development of job

knowledge (Hunter, 1986), task ability is expected to directly impact performance because it

directly reflects the ability to perform specific tasks. Task ability consists of a variety of

knowledge, skills, and abilities, including procedural and declarative knowledge, task skills, and

physical abilities (Tziner and Eden, 1985; Neuman and Wright, 1999). Thus, task ability

encompasses the knowledge and skill to perform task specific behaviors.

Task ability impacts team performance both due to the direct contribution of individual

team members and also through the interaction between team members. Tziner and Eden (1985)

found that uniformly poor ability teams performed much worse than expected based on the

individual ability of each team member, whereas uniformly high ability teams performed much

better than expected. They suggested that this result may be a function of the interpersonal

processes that arise within the team. More specifically, they suggested that having a uniformly

low ability team would produce interpersonal conflict as a result of unfilled role expectations and

the negative feedback resulting from low team performance. In contrast, they suggested that high

ability teams could capitalize on synergies within the team to produce high performance. For

example, having high ability teammates may result in more efficient communication, as team

members can be performance oriented by avoiding having to spend time coaching other team

members. Similarly, being surrounded by high ability teammates may motivate team members to

match or exceed the individual performance of their teammates. This suggests that higher levels

of task ability will increase team performance.

H4: Teams with overall higher levels of task ability will have higher levels of team performance.

Additive Effects


Thus far, we have made hypotheses predicting relationships between team characteristics

and performance. As reflected in our development of the hypotheses, we expect that each

characteristic impacts different team processes and behaviors. For example, career experience is

expected to produce job-relevant knowledge and team experience is expected to produce mental

models and transactive memory. In addition, task ability is conceptually distinct from

experience, as it is composed of knowledge, skills, and abilities, rather than quantity or quality of

past experience. Although there is some expected overlap between the constructs empirically

(e.g., there should be a positive relationship between team experience and career experience, as it

is not possible to accumulate team experience unless you also are accumulating career

experience), we still expect that they will demonstrate meaningful independent and non-

redundant relationships with performance.

H5: Career experience, experience in challenging situations, team experience, and task ability will incrementally predict team performance.

THE IMPORTANCE OF STRATEGIC CORE ROLES

Having established which team member characteristics are important for team

performance in general, we can now return to a consideration of why some team roles (and the

individual characteristics of those role holders) are more important for team performance. As

articulated earlier, roles in the team that: (1) have more exposure to the tasks that the team is

performing, (2) encounter more of the problems the team faces, and (3) are unique and non-

substitutable are likely to be more critical for team performance. It follows that teams will

perform better if the individuals in these strategic core roles possess higher levels of the

experience and ability characteristics that generally produce higher levels of team performance.

This suggests that the experience and ability of strategic core role holders should be more

strongly related to team performance than the same characteristics of the non-core team


members. In the previous section, we identified specific composition characteristics that we

expect to be important for team performance. If a strategic core is relevant to a team, these

characteristics will be more important for team success when possessed by the team members in

the strategic core.

H6a: The overall career experience of core role holders will be more strongly related to team performance than the career experience of non-core role holders.

H6b: The overall experience in challenging situations of core role holders will be more strongly related to team performance than the experience in challenging situations of non-core role holders.

H6c: The overall team experience of core role holders will be more strongly related to team performance than the team experience of non-core role holders.

H6d: The task ability of core role holders will be more strongly related to team performance than the task ability of non-core role holders.

H6e: The overall career experience, experience in challenging situations, team experience, and task ability of core and non-core role holders will incrementally predict team performance

METHOD

Setting

We chose Major League Baseball as the setting to study our hypothesized relationships.

Baseball is a team sport, in which a team of twenty-five players competes against another team.

At any given time, only nine team members are actively participating in the competition, though

other team members may be substituted in at any time. Each team competes in 162 games during

the season (which is the unit of time analyzed in this study). In each game, there are nine innings.

Within an inning, each team has the opportunity to attempt to both score runs (i.e., accumulate

points for their team by having a player successfully touch all four bases) and to prevent the

other team from scoring runs. The team tha t has scored more runs at the end of the nine innings

is declared the winner.


There were several reasons for choosing baseball as the setting for our study. First, sports

teams have objective and easily interpretable performance measures (Pfeffer and Davis-Blake,

1986). As such, this avoids problems associated with perceptual team performance measures.

Second, because of its public and wide appeal, a considerable amount of objective data is

available on the key study constructs. Third, although it might not be immediately apparent how

the lessons learned about sports teams would transfer to organizational teams, Keidel (1987) has

suggested that the pooled interdependence in baseball teams and the attendant coordination

demands have distinct implications for studying teams in general. In fact, other organizational

scholars have successfully studied organizational phenomena in the context of sports teams (e.g.,

Hofmann, Jacobs, and Gerras, 1992; Staw and Hoang, 1995; Wright, Smart, and McMahan,

1995). Fourth, baseball provides a setting where there is a clear difference between core and non-

core role holders. In other settings, core and non-core roles will likely reside within a continuum

and not be as clearly differentiated. Finally, using Sundstrom, de Meuse, and Futrell’s (1990)

typology, a baseball team can be thought of as an action team. That means that the team has high

different iation (i.e., there is high specialization and exclusive membership in the team) and has

brief performance episodes that are repeated frequently.

Sample

Data from Major League Baseball teams from 1974-2002 were used to test the

hypotheses. This 29 year period was chosen because 1974 marks the start of free-agency in

baseball, which dramatically changed the movement of players, with an attendant influence on

the experience and ability composition of teams. This resulted in a pooled and cross-sectional

data set that includes 778 observations. We obtained data from the Baseball Archive (Lahman,

2004) and Retrosheet (2004), comprehensive guides to team and game-level data. As noted by


others who have used data from the baseball context (Hofmann, Jacobs, and Gerras, 1992;

Timmerman, 2000), baseball teams consist of two distinct groups: pitchers and position players.

Because the statistics of pitchers and position players are not directly comparable and because

individual pitchers play in fewer games each year than position players, all variables were

standardized prior to analysis.

All experience and ability measures were aggregated to the role (i.e., core/non-core) or

team level, depending on the analysis. On average, there were approximately 18 individuals in

the core role within a team and 19 individuals in the non-core role within a team.

Measures

Strategic core of the team. In our study, the strategic core of the team was defined as

pitchers (as opposed to the position players). Both baseball experts and players alike have noted

that pitchers play a central role for the success of their team (James, 2001), with the popular

adage “good pitching beats good hitting” repeated often by announcers, players, managers, and

writers.

We earlier characterized a strategic core of a team as one in which the role handles more

of the work than other roles, the role encounters more of the problems facing the team, and only

a few people perform the role. In determining whether pitchers are appropriate to be categorized

as the core, we need to determine whether it fulfills these criteria. First, regarding the handling of

work, it is important to note that all plays run directly through the pitching position. That is, a

pitcher initiates every action within a game. On some plays, the pitcher and the catcher are the

only players to act at all (i.e., the pitcher throws the ball, the catcher catches the ball, and the

batter does not swing at it). In contrast, up to nine team members could all perform some action

on another play. However, regardless of how a play develops, the pitcher is involved at least at


the beginning, whereas no other player is guaranteed to be involved. Thus, the pitching role

handles more work than any other role. Second, as no other position initiates action, considerable

variance in a team’s performance occurs as a function of what a pitcher initiates. Third, in

baseball, the pitching position is a unique role within the team. That is, only one person is

responsible for pitching at a time, whereas nine team members are responsible for batting. Taken

together, this suggests that the pitching role is the strategic core of the team1.

Career experience. Career experience represents the quantity of experience that a player

has accumulated in his career across all teams he has played for. Therefore, it was

operationalized as the combination of the number of games played and either at-bats or innings

pitched (depending on whether the focal individual was a position player or pitcher). This

combination reflected both the volume and depth of career experience. Individually, the two

variables are correlated greater than .85. As with all of our experience measures, career

experience was composed to reflect the amount of experience possessed at the beginning of the

season. In addition, all variables were coded such that high numbers indicate higher levels of the

relevant construct. For pitchers, teams averaged 140 games (SD = 47) and 502 innings pitched

(SD = 327) per player. For position players, teams averaged 480 games (SD = 154) and 1582 at

bats (SD = 545) per player.

Experience in challenging situations. Experience in challenging situations represents

the richness of experience. It was operationalized as the number of postseason games played

1 We believe that it is most appropriate to divide the team into pitchers and position players, following past research (Hofmann, Jacobs, and Gerras, 1992; Timmerman, 2000). However, one aspect of our justification for why pitchers would occupy the core role in the team (i.e., pitchers are involved in every play) also suggests that the catcher may be part of the strategic core. For example, the catchers call the pitch to be thrown, most actions end with the catchers holding the ball, and so on. As such, in addition to operationalizing the pitching position as the strategic core, we conducted an additional set of analyses in which we operationalized the core as both pitchers and catchers. Changing the operationalization of the core to include both pitchers and catchers did not meaningfully change the results of any analysis, as the regression coefficients fell within the confidence intervals of each other regardless of the conceptualization. Because we feel that it is most appropriate to operationalize the strategic core as pitchers versus position players, we have retained our original operationalization.


(i.e., divisional series, league championship series, and the world series). This was chosen

because postseason games offer players an opportunity to play against the highest level of

competition in a pressure-packed environment. In postseason games, teams must consistently

compete against the highest level of competition. In this context, teams know more about their

opponents than at any other point in the season, as franchises employ intense scouting of the

norms and routines of the players. Thus, in order to be successful in this context, players must

learn to adjust their behavior. For pitchers, teams averaged 1.67 games pitched (SD = 1.56) per

player. For position players, teams averaged 4.57 games played (SD = 3.68) per player.

Team experience. Team experience represents the amount of experience players have

with their current team. Thus, it was operationalized as the number of years each player has

continuously been with the focal team, aggregated to the team level. For pitchers, teams

averaged 1.49 years with the team (SD = .64) per player. For position players, teams averaged

1.86 years with the team (SD = .75) per player.

Task ability. Task ability represents team members’ specific ability to perform the task.

As noted previously, a strength of using baseball for hypothesis testing is that there is a large

amount of objective performance metrics. However, a downside is that there is an

overabundance of performance metrics, without a clear consensus of the best ways of measuring

performance. The classically studied metrics are batting average (for batters) and earned run

average (for pitchers). However, over the past two decades, researchers and statisticians have

developed numerous more complicated metrics for assessing performance. For example, some

teams now rely on indices such as batting average against, batting average with balls in play,

slugging percentage, isolated power, runs created, equivalent average, and win shares to assess

individual and team performance (James and Henzler, 2002; Lewis, 2003b). As there is not a


consensus on the best metrics (and many of these metrics are highly related), we chose to

operationalize ability using two rate statistics: on base percentage for and on base percentage

against. The first measure reflects a position player’s ability to reach base successfully, either

from a hit, walk, or hit by pitch. The second reflects a pitcher’s ability to prevent a batter from

reaching base. Both of these measures are similar in form and represent similar abilities (i.e., the

attainment or prevention of players getting on base). In addition, they are consistent with the

classically studied baseball metrics. For example, on base percentage against is highly correlated

with earned run average (r = .69 in our dataset)2.

Each average was standardized and on base percentage against was reversed so that

higher scores represented higher levels of ability. Because current ability (i.e., current individual

performance) is likely both related to and a function of current team performance, we used a one

year-lag (i.e., from the previous season) for our ability measure. A one-year lag provides a good

approximation of the ability level of a player at the beginning of the season and is not influenced

by how the team performed within the focal season. If a team member did not play in the majors

the previous season, their data was treated as missing and the team ability measure was created

by averaging the remainder of the team members. For pitchers, teams averaged an on base

percentage against of .330 (SD = .02). For position players, teams averaged an on base

percentage of .310 (SD = .08).

Team performance. The dependent variable for testing the proposed relationships was

team performance. The most commonly accepted measure of team performance in Major League

Baseball, as well as most professional sports, is team winning percentage (Kahn, 1993;

2 Although we chose to use on base percentage for and on base percentage against as our measure of ability, we also tested our hypotheses alternately using on-base percentage plus slugging percentage (OPS) for batters (following recent arguments for its validity, Lewis, 2003b) and earned run average for pitchers. The use of either (or both) of these alternate measures of ability did not meaningfully change our results. Thus, we believe that our measures of ability were appropriate for this study.


Chatterjee, Campbell, and Wiseman, 1994). Baseball performance can be conceptualized through

its component parts (e.g., runs scored or runs allowed), statistical estimates of performance (e.g.,

the Pythagorean Method, James, 1982), or related concepts (e.g., attendance or profit). However,

these either lack the completeness of winning percentage (e.g., actual winning percentage is

correlated .43 with runs scored and -.45 with runs allowed) or are not as intrinsically meaningful

to the teams, players, or fans as actual winning percentage. Moreover, even though statistics such

as the Pythagorean winning percentage may be better predictors of future performance (James,

1982), they tend to be fairly strongly related to actual winning percentage. For example, actual

winning percentage is correlated .94 with the Pythagorean winning percentage.

As baseball teams play 162 games during a season, there are essentially 162 dichotomous

evaluations of performance. Combining together these 162 performance evaluations into one

global measure results in a highly reliable estimate of performance. Thus, performance was

operationalized at the season level, rather than at the game level.

League . Baseball teams compete in one of two leagues (American and National). These

leagues have slightly different rules (e.g., the pitchers in the American League do not bat) and

norms (e.g., previous to 2003, the strike zones were informally slightly different depending on

league). To allay concerns, we statistically controlled for league in our analyses. League was

dummy coded such that 0 = American League and 1 = National League.

RESULTS

Table 1 presents the correlation matrix for the variables of interest. As seen in the table,

the correlation between experience variables ranged in magnitude from .04 to .62. The

correlation of .62 between career experience and experience in challenging situations suggests

that players who have played longer have a greater chance of having reached the post season.


More generally, these correlations demonstrate that the experience constructs do not extensively

overlap with each other. In addition, the correlation between ability and the experience

constructs ranged in magnitude from .15 to .34.

We first tested the main effect hypotheses (H1, H2, H3, and H4) using Ordinary Least

Square (OLS) regression. We hypothesized that career experience, experience in challenging

situations, team experience, and task ability would all be related to higher levels of team

performance. As shown in Table 2, these variables were all statistically significant. First, career

experience was important, t (1, 775) = 14.03, p < .001, supporting Hypothesis 1. Second, we

found that experience in challenging situations significantly related to performance, t (1, 775) =

12.42, p < .001, supporting Hypothesis 2. Third, team experience was important, t (1, 775) =

9.03, p < .001, supporting Hypothesis 3. Finally, we found that task ability significantly related

to performance, t (1, 775) = 10.99, p < .001, supporting Hypothesis 4.

Next, we tested the first incremental hypotheses (H5) by performing an OLS regression

in which team performance was regressed on all four experience and ability characteristics

simultaneously. As shown in Table 3, all four of the characteristics (i.e., career experience,

experience in challenging situations, team experience, and task ability) independently related to

performance, together explaining 28% of the variance in team performance, ? F (4, 772) = 75.87,

p < .001. Thus, Hypothesis 5 is supported, indicating that the variables demonstrate independent

relationships with performance.

We next tested whether core and non-core characteristics were differentially related to

team performance (H6a, H6b, H6c, and H6d) by running regressions (presented in Table 4) and

testing the differences in partial betas that result from these equations (Cohen and Cohen, 1983).

First, career experience of core role holders was more strongly related to team performance than


career experience of non-core role holders, t (1, 776) = 2.05, p = .04, supporting Hypothesis 6a.

Second, experience in challenging situations of core role holders was more strongly related to

team performance than experience in challenging situations of non-core role holders, t (1, 776) =

2.58, p = .01, supporting Hypothesis 6b. Third, team experience of core role holders was not

more strongly related to team performance than team experience of non-core role holders, t (1,

776) = .37, p = .71. Thus, Hypothesis 6c was not supported. Finally, task ability of core role

holders was more strongly related to team performance than task ability of non-core role holders,

t (1, 776) = 2.14, p = .03, supporting Hypothesis 6d.

Finally, we tested whether the characteristics independently related to performance when

split into the core and non-core components of the team (H6e). As shown in Table 5, we see that

experience with team no longer independently related to performance when split into core (ß =

.03) and non-core membership (ß = .06). In addition, we note that experience in challenging

situations for non-core role holders was not related to performance (ß = -.02). Although

dampened in magnitude, the rest of the results remained significant when simultaneously

regressed. Although this data does not fully support Hypothesis 6e, there is strong evidence that

most characteristics demonstrate independent relationships with performance.

In addition, this regression once again highlights that experience and ability have larger

relationships with performance when the characteristics are possessed by core role holders. For

all characteristics other than team experience, the standardized regression coefficient for non-

core role holders was at most 76% of the value of the standardized coefficient for core role

holders (i.e., the ß for task ability of non-core role holders was .13, compared to a ß of .17 for

core role holders). In contrast, the results demonstrate that the experience in challenging


situations was most different for non-core versus core role holders, with the non-core regression

coefficient only 10% of the magnitude of the core coefficient.

DISCUSSION

The results of this study confirm that four different experience and ability constructs are

related to higher levels of team performance. More interestingly, the results demonstrate that it

matters where these characteristics reside. That is, core role holder characteristics (i.e., career

experience, experience in challenging situations, and task ability) were more strongly related to

performance than the non-core role holder characteristics.

Theoretical Implications

The contributions of this paper can be delineated into three broad categories:

contributions to the study of individual differences in teams, contributions to the study of team

role structure, and contributions to the study of macro-level organizational theories. First, this

paper contributes to the study of individual differences in teams by demonstrating that four

individual difference cons tructs (three experience and one ability) independently related to team

performance. Much of the previous research examining experience at the team level has

investigated one construct at a time, rather than several characteristics simultaneously. However,

by simultaneously regressing these characteristics, shared variance was removed, leaving their

independent contribution. Using this method, we provide evidence that three dimensions of

experience independently relate to performance. This is important, as there have been multiple

calls for greater complexity in the study of experience (Quiñones, Ford, and Teachout, 1995;

Tesluk and Jacobs, 1998). The results of this study provide one step towards expanding and

elucidating the dimensions of experience and their relationship with performance within teams.


Of particular interest is our investigation of experience with challenging situations. To

our knowledge, this construct has not been investigated in teams. Yet, our results demonstrate

that this construct is strongly related to team performance. Given the strength of this relationship

and Tesluk and Jacobs’ (1998) observation that experience quality has not been sufficiently

studied, our results suggest that previous research may have suffered from omitted variable

issues. Future research is advised to integrate experience quality in models examining individual

differences in teams. In addition, as Tesluk and Jacobs (1998) suggested that experience quality

also can be conceptualized as variety and complexity of experience, researchers are encouraged

to expand the conceptualization and operationalization of experience quality.

Turning to our other experience constructs, we found that career experience was the

strongest predictor of team performance. This is not surprising, as career experience is the most

investigated experience construct at the individual level. Our results confirm that this interest is

well founded.

Our final experience construct was team experience. As this is the most studied team-

level experience construct and has been suggested as the strongest and most replicable

relationship in the teams literature (Hackman, 2002), we were surprised that it had the smallest

relationship with performance when simultaneously examined with the other experience

constructs. Moreover, this was the only construct in our study to not differentially relate to team

performance when split into core and non-core roles, even when independently regressed. This

may be partially attributable to the low level of interdependence within baseball teams. That is,

as opposed to many other work teams in which individual performance within the team is

dependent on the outputs of other team members, baseball team members can generally perform

their role without significant contributions from their team members. Therefore, the benefits of


team experience (e.g., shared mental models and transactive memory) should not confer as great

a performance gain in lower interdependence contexts such as baseball.

Second, this paper contributes to the study of team role structure by demonstrating that a

role system is not necessarily homogenous within a team. That is, our study demonstrates that

some roles in teams and the characteristics of the role holders are more important than other

roles. Our theory and results demonstrate the need to consider parts of the whole (i.e., the roles

within the team) rather than just the entire team when examining team performance.

Another notable consequence of our findings regarding the relevance of core roles is that

it calls into question other studies’ results. If previous research did not examine the importance

of certain core roles within the teams they studied, they may have over- or under-estimated their

results. In studies that have demonstrated null results between inputs, processes, and outcomes,

lack of results may be the function of non-core role holders suppressing the results. For example,

in the personality literature, there has been extensive speculation about the relationship between

team personality and performance. However, the results have been equivocal (Moynihan and

Peterson, 2001). The non-significant results may not be the function of weak theory, but rather

that researchers have failed to investigate where personality resides within the team. That is,

although two teams may have equivalent mean levels of conscientiousness, a team in which the

high conscientiousness resides in the core role holders should perform better than a team in

which the high conscientiousness resides in the non-core role holders. However, the main effect

between team conscientiousness and performance would be limited, as the same mean level of

conscientiousness would demonstrate both high and low performance. Areas such as motivation

and performance effectiveness would benefit from considering whether a strategic core exists

and is relevant for specific team types under observation.


Finally, this study makes several contributions to the study of macro- level organizational

theories. First, we believe that our study provides some evidence that strategic core resources

translate from macro- level research to meso- level research. Within a team, these resources may

be the roles themselves. At an organization level, these resources may be specific knowledge-

based resources (Delery and Shaw, 2001) or property-based resources (Miller and Shamsie,

1996). Regardless of their form, these resources provide an above-normal influence on the

behavior of the collective and thus are more important to its success.

Our study provides evidence that the characteristics of the strategic core are related to the

performance of the team. This notion may translate to other levels of analysis, such that certain

resources may represent a relevant strategic core to the organization, but may vary on specific

dimensions that influence performance of the organization. According to the resource-based

view of the firm, a strategic core resource provides above normal returns when it is valuable,

rare, nonsubstitutable, and inimitable (Barney, 1991). Of these four characteristics, value is the

most important but hardest to parameterize (Barney, 2001) and thus serves as one of the largest

outlets for criticism of the resource-based view (Barney, 2001; Priem and Butler, 2001).

Researchers often assume a resource is valuable if it provides above normal returns. In contrast,

our research a priori specified several characteristics that we believed were valuable to a team

and could serve to provide above normal performance to a team when possessed by the strategic

core. With few studies having been able to a priori specify resources that are valuable (see Miller

and Shamsie, 1996 for a notable exception), we believe that our operationalization of value

provides an important guidepost. Using micro- and meso-level theories to define value may

enable macro- level researchers to better operationalize value.

Limitations, Generalizability, and Future Research


One possible concern about our study is that this set of results may be idiosyncratic to the

baseball context. However, we believe that there are several reasons why this not a concern.

First, just as organizational teams often have long life spans, baseball teams operate continuously

for seven months. Second, baseball teams are intensive teams, such that they work together for

three hours a day, six days a week. Third, baseball teams have numerous performance episodes

with situationally relevant outcomes. Similar to organizational teams, individual team members

are rewarded based on both their own and the team’s performance; they can lose their job if they

no longer perform to an acceptable level. Fourth, other researchers have used this context to

examine organizational phenomena, producing relationships replicable in other contexts (Pfeffer

and Davis-Blake, 1986; Hofmann, Jacobs, and Gerras, 1992).

Beyond the issue of the relevancy of these types of teams, it is also important to keep in

mind the research question when assessing external validity. The focus of this study was not on

the performance of baseball teams in general, but rather on both testing the strategic core theory

and assessing the relationships between experience, ability, and performance. As there is no

specific reason to think that the psychological and social constructs we hypothesized to exist

would not manifest themselves in this context, baseball teams provide a legitimate context to test

our hypotheses. Moreover, we have no reason to suspect that a strategic core would only

manifest itself in baseball teams. Thus, we believe that our study and the population examined

herein provide an adequate and acceptable first test of our theory of the strategic core.

Another potential limitation of this study is that we do not have process data. Although

baseball provides excellent performance criteria and a number of measures of experience and

task ability, we lacked the ability to measure a number of emergent team states and processes

(e.g., tacit knowledge, mental models, transactive memory, the development and destruction of


routines, and cognitive overload) that we suggested in the introduction. However, other research

does suggest that these mechanisms would be operating in these teams in the presence of specific

types of experience and ability. For example, there is an extensive set of literature demonstrating

that increasing career experience will result in higher levels of tacit job knowledge at both the

individual and team level (Schmidt, Hunter, and Outerbridge, 1986; Berman, Down, and Hill,

2002). However, as our study does not eliminate alternative mediational processes, we encourage

researchers to verify the specific processes through which experience and ability produce

performance in teams.

In developing this study, we hypothesized and found that experience had a linear

relationship with performance. However, there is some reason to suspect that this relationship

may be curvilinear. For example, in a meta-analysis of the relationship between experience and

job performance, McDaniel, Schmidt, and Hunter (1988) found a decreasing relationship

between experience and individual performance as level of experience increased. Thus, it is easy

to conclude that experience provides diminishing returns and even suspect that at high enough

levels of experience, performance actually decreases. However, at the team level, there are

several reasons to suspect that this curvilinear relationship is less important. First, because the

experience of a number of team members is averaged, it is hard to reach very high levels of

team-level experience (whether experience is career experience, team experience, or experience

in challenging situations). Second, due to the dynamic and self-correcting nature of teams, low

performers will be eventually excised from the team. Therefore, the high individual experience

team members will only exert a short lasting and small in magnitude negative effect on the team.

Third, there is empirical evidence that the relationship is very small in teams. For example,

Berman, Down, and Hill (2002) found a curvilinear relationship between team experience and


team performance. However, they noted that this was only a small effect and “only a handful of

teams … may have encountered this problem” (Berman, Down, and Hill, 2002, p. 23).

Combining this information together, we believe that, in practice, teams will either not

experience the diminishing returns associated with individual experience, or only encounter a

minimal negative impact that is corrected quickly.

In this study, we specifically focused on experience and ability, as there is a great deal of

evidence that they impact individual level performance. However, there is a growing awareness

of other characteristics that impact team performance, such as demography or personality. Future

research should test the strategic core proposition with other characteristics, in other contexts. In

addition, researchers are encouraged to examine experience and ability with other team types. In

this study, our examination of baseball teams meant that we focused on one example of action

teams. However, Sundstrom, de Meuse, and Futrell (1990) also suggest that there are three other

team types: advice/involvement, production/service, and project/development teams. These

teams differ on work-team differentiation, external integration, work cycles, and typical outputs.

These distinctions may lead to the differential impact of the experience and skill constructs

examined herein. Moreover, the strategic core may take a different shape or have a different

impact on performance in these different team types. That is, a strategic core may be more

relevant with certain team types than others. Thus, future research should broaden the

generalizability of the strategic core notion by examining the different team types.

A potential boundary condition for our theory is that the mere existence of the strategic

core may not be enough to lead to a differential impact on performance. That is, certain

characteristics of the team or situation may make the difference between the core and non-core

members irrelevant. One potentially important characteristic is the level of interdependence


between roles. Delery and Shaw (2001) suggested that high interdependence between employee

groups within a firm limits the relevance of a strategic core and thus necessitates the

prioritization of both groups. That is, if groups are reciprocally interdependent, they each are

reliant on the outputs of other groups in order to perform their tasks. Within teams, it may be that

a strategic core is more relevant when a team has lower levels of interdependence between the

core and non-core roles. A second characteristic of a team likely to impact the relevance of the

strategic core is the focus of the team. When a team is task-focused (i.e., primarily focused on

goal attainment and performance), unique, non-substitutable roles that have more exposure to

tasks being performed and produce more problems should be more critical for team performance.

In contrast, a strategic core may be irrelevant in a team that is primarily focused on viability,

cohesion, and the maintenance of relationships within the team, as the characteristics of a

strategic core are not likely to be related to these outcomes. Future research should examine not

only whether a strategic core exists, but also whether it is relevant to separately consider the core

and non-core role holders.

Conclusion

Although teams have become an integral part of organizations, there is continuing

confusion over how team member contributions impact team performance. In this paper, we

developed a theory of the strategic core of teams, which suggests that certain subsets of a team

are critically important to the performance of that team. Our study demonstrated that several

characteristics were more strongly related to performance when possessed by core role holders

than when possessed by non-core role holders. The theory and results of this paper provide a

preliminary step for investigating more than just teams as a whole, but rather the contributions of

different roles.


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Table 1

Intercorrelations of Study Variables

Variable 1 2 3 4 5 6 1. League -- 2. Career experience -.01 -- 3. Experience in challenging situations .10 .62 -- 4. Team experience .04 .40 .34 -- 5. Task ability .15 .32 .29 .34 -- 6. Team performance .11 .45 .41 .31 .38 --

Note: League is coded (0 = American League, 1 = National League). Correlations greater than .07 are significant p < .05. Correlations greater than .09 are significant p < .01.


Table 2

Regression Results for Overall Effects

Step Variable ß ? R2 Variable ß ? R2 Variable ß ? R2 Variable ß ? R2

1 League .11** .01** League .11** .01** League .11** .01** League .11** .01** 2 Career

experience

.45** .20** Experience in challenging situations

.41** .16** Team experience

.31** .09** Ability

.37** .13**

Note: N = 778. * p < .05 ** p < .01


Table 3

Regression Results for Overall Incremental Effects

Step Variable ß ? R2

1 League .11** .01**

2 Career experience .24** .28**

Experience in challenging situations .17**

Team experience .08*

Task ability .22**

Note: N = 778. * p < .05 ** p < .01


Table 4

Regression Results for Core versus Non-Core Tests

Step Variable ß ? R2 Variable ß ? R2 Variable ß ? R2 Variable ß ? R2

1 League .11** .01** League .11** .01** League .11** .01** League .11** .01** 2 Career

experience (non-core

team members)

.20** .20** Experience in challenging situations

(non-core team members)

.10* .17** Team experience (non-core team

members)

.16** .09** Ability (non-core

team members)

.21** .14**

Career

experience (core team members)

.32** Experience in challenging situations (core team members)

.33** Team experience (core team members)

.19** Ability (core team

members)

.31**

Note: N = 778. * p < .05 ** p < .01


Table 5

Regression Results for Core vs. Non-Core Incremental Effects

Step Variable ß R2

1 League .11** .01**

2 Career experience (non-core team members) .11** .29**

Career experience (core team members) .17**

Experience in challenging situations (non-core team members) -.02

Experience in challenging situations (core team members) .21**

Team experience (non-core team members) .04

Team experience (core team members) .05

Task ability (non-core team members) .13**

Task ability (core team members) .17**

Note: N = 778. * p < .05 ** p < .01

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