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Contrary to popular belief, researchers have found that after a certain point, the addition of more superstar talent to a team can actually be detrimental, resulting in poorer team performance.
The presence of too many individuals with top talent can undermine players' willingness to coordinate, which can compromise effective teamwork and overall team performance, the findings showed.
"Most people believe that the relationship between talent and team performance is linear - the more their team is packed with talent, the better they will do," said Roderick Swaab, professor at France-based INSEAD, one of the world's leading and largest graduate business schools.
"For teams requiring high levels of interdependence, like football and basketball, talent facilitates team performance but only up to a point," Swaab explained.
"Beyond this point, the benefits of adding more top talent will decrease and eventually hurt the team performance because they fail to coordinate their actions," he added.
The research indicates that the too-much-talent effect only emerges in sports that require a high level of interdependence between players.
For more individualistic sports, such as baseball, very high levels of talent do not seem to hurt the performance of the team.
The findings are set to appear in the journal Psychological Science.
