Team Players: How Social Skills Improve Team Performance

Most jobs require teamwork. Are some people good team players? In this paper, we design and test a new method for identifying individual contributions to production. We randomly assign multiple teams predict performance based on previously assessed skills. Some consistently cause their exceed its predicted performance. call these individuals “team players.” Team players score significantly higher well‐established measure of social intelligence, but do not differ across variety other dimensions, including IQ, personality, education, gender. Social skills —defined as single latent factor that combines intelligence scores with the player effect—improve about much IQ. find suggestive evidence increase effort among teammates.