Strategic Core v3 Morgeson and Mannor...strategic core of teams that suggests that certain subsets...
Transcript of Strategic Core v3 Morgeson and Mannor...strategic core of teams that suggests that certain subsets...
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
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]
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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.
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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
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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.
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
A Theory of the Strategic Core 20
(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
A Theory of the Strategic Core 21
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.
A Theory of the Strategic Core 22
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.
A Theory of the Strategic Core 23
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
A Theory of the Strategic Core 24
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
A Theory of the Strategic Core 25
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.
A Theory of the Strategic Core 26
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
A Theory of the Strategic Core 27
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.
A Theory of the Strategic Core 28
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
A Theory of the Strategic Core 29
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
A Theory of the Strategic Core 30
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
A Theory of the Strategic Core 31
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
A Theory of the Strategic Core 32
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.
A Theory of the Strategic Core 33
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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.
A Theory of the Strategic Core 46
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
A Theory of the Strategic Core 47
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
A Theory of the Strategic Core 48
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
A Theory of the Strategic Core 49
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