by Walter Frick
Most companies will tell you they want to hire and retain “A players”, and why not? It’s hard to object to building a company around the best possible talent. But what is it about superstar talent that actually improves performance? A recent paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research examines this question by looking at academic departments, where productivity can be measured in terms of papers published and citations from other researchers. Superstars were defined as academics who ranked above the 90th percentile based on citation-weighted publications. The paper points to three different ways that superstars can improve an organization, and measures the magnitude of each in the context of academic evolutionary biology departments. The first, and most obvious, is the direct increase in output that a superstar can have. Hire someone who can get a lot of great work done quickly and your organization will by definition be producing more great work. But, perhaps surprisingly, this represents only a small fraction of the change that superstars have on output. The authors write:
On average, department-level output increases by 54% after the arrival of a star. A significant fraction of the star effect is indirect: after removing the direct contribution of the star, department level output still increases by 48%. Continue reading
