On baseball and business teams, core role holders are keys to success.

• Author: Boutelle, Clif

Researchers find that baseball teams investing in highly skilled pitchers and catchers, whom they consider "core role" players, enjoy greater success. This model, they say, also translates to business work teams, which should be constructed around strategic core role holders rather than individual characteristics.

Teams are generally thought of as a group of individuals working together to achieve something of value, whether it is the goal of a baseball team to win games or a business team formed to help the organization be competitive.

"Teams are very much a part of organizations," says Stephen Humphrey, an assistant professor of management at Pennsylvania State University's Smeal College of Business. He cited a 1999 study that found 50% of business organizations employed teams in a meaningful capacity and added that "given what we have learned in the intervening years, the use of work teams has become even more prevalent."

Humphrey and colleagues Frederick Morgeson of Michigan State University and Michael J. Mannor of the University of Notre Dame have produced research on creating work teams based upon what they identify as core roles within the team rather than focusing on the individuals comprising the team. Their findings will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Much of the research in team composition has tended to center on individuals and leveraging their attributes to create an effective team, the researchers noted.

Although individuals on the team are important, Humphrey and his colleagues contend that even more important are the core, or central, roles within the team. Core role holders are those who encounter more of the problems that need to be overcome by the team, have a greater exposure to the tasks that the team is performing, and are more central to the workflow of the team.

"Consider a surgical team in which one role performs the surgical procedures, another assists the surgeon and yet another provides and monitors anesthesia. Though the assistant and anesthetist are important to the team's success, it is the surgeon who has the central role," said Humphrey.

"Our contention is that the structure of a team consists of different roles and that some are more important than others. All roles are not created equally," said Humphrey, hence the emergence of core role holders.

Further, the researchers suggest that organizations allocate more resources toward the primary role holders, based...