Superstar Skills or Emotional Intelligence, Which Matters More for Team Performance? A Study of NBA Players Offers a Surprising Answer...

An analysis of NBA teams’ performance offers a stark warning to any leader considering hiring a narcissistic superstar.

Sports stars have incredible skills, and often incredible egos to go with them. You might think limelight-hogging prima donna behavior is just the price their teams have to pay to win. But is that accurate? Are stars with big egos actually worth all the headaches they cause?

This isn’t just a question for coaches of sports teams. Leaders in the business world often have to weigh the tradeoffs between exceptional performance and obnoxious behavior too. Do you hire the jerk superstar or the slightly less skilled team player??

Handily, a recent study offers an answer. In research published in the Academy of Management Journal, business school professors studied narcissism among NBA players and came to a conclusion relevant to every kind of leader—big egos generally aren’t worth the hassle.?

The effect of big egos on NBA team performance?

How do you measure the narcissism levels of NBA players? By looking at their Twitter (now X) activity, of course.?

Previous research has shown that the more people tweet, the higher their level of narcissism generally is (I’ll leave it to you to decide what this says about Elon Musk). Other studies have found that profile photos are a fairly reliable indicator of narcissism. If a guy is flexing or posing shirtless on social media, that probably means exactly what it looks like.?

A team out of the University at Buffalo leaned on these prior findings to analyze 35,000 tweets from nearly 400 pro basketball players. They then compared how big players talked online with how well they actually played throughout the 2013-14 season.?

Did obnoxious online grandstanding translate to on-court performance for their teams? Nope, and for a specific reason. While low narcissism teams improved coordination and performance as the season went on, teams stacked with big egos stagnated. They just couldn’t learn from each other or gel properly, and that?showed up on the scoreboard.?

“The Charlotte Bobcats had the lowest team mean narcissism score. Before the season, they were forecast to win approximately 26 out of 82 games—which would have been one of the worst records in the league. Instead, the Bobcats ended up with 43 wins and made the playoffs,” reports lead author Emily Grijalva on The Conversation.?

The New York Knicks had the highest narcissism score that season. How’d they do? “According to predictive models, the Knicks were supposed to have 49 wins. However, they finished the season with only 37 and missed the playoffs,” Grijalva notes (no doubt to groans from long-suffering Knicks fans).?

The same is true in soccer and business?

The fact that huge egos kill team cohesion over time, offsetting any gains their skills bring, is probably not a huge shock to anyone who has ever had to work with a narcissist. If people only think about themselves and treat others as stepping stones to their own advancement, it’s unsurprising that cooperation proves difficult.?

In fact, a variety of other studies in different contexts turn up the same pattern again and again. One counterintuitive analysis of World Cup soccer teams found that the more superstars a team had, the worse they tended to do.?

“Teams with very high levels of top talent actually performed worse,” INSEAD Knowledge explained, summing up the findings. “These teams failed to coordinate their actions.” A follow-up study showed this prima donna effect was less pronounced in baseball, a sport where coordination is less important.?

In the world of business, a Harvard study of some 60,000 workers crunched numbers to discover that hiring a top performer benefited companies a little more than $5,000 on average, while firing a toxic jerk returned more than $12,000 in increased team output.?

Narcissists’ shenanigans cost teams far more than their skills benefited them, whether measured in goals or dollars.?

Beware skills without EQ

If you’re a manager or a coach, it’s easy to be dazzled by a prospective hire’s impressive skills. And skill does matter. You can’t just pick random guys off the street and hope to win in the NBA. No one is saying talent isn’t important. But when exceptional talent is combined with narcissism, it’s going to cost you more than it will benefit you.?

Which points straight to a clear takeaway for leaders: You need to look for much more than technical talent. Literally and metaphorically, a superstar who can sink every three-pointer won’t do you any good if the rest of the team doesn’t trust that person enough to put the ball in their hands. Emotional intelligence and general decency matter.?

Grijalva expresses this nicely: “Clearly, when building a team—whether it’s in sports or in business—focusing exclusively on talent only goes so far. Intangible attributes, such as a willingness to put aside self-interest and collaborate with others, can be just as important. Ignoring this can prevent a team from reaching its full potential.”?

It’s a warning entrepreneurs should heed as much as basketball coaches.?

EXPERT OPINION BY JESSICA STILLMAN

Republished by Greg Herrera: Silicon Valley CEO Group; Helping leaders benefit their companies, families and society...