Team Success: Aligning Means with Objectives

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In corporations, sports, and academia, people often face challenges they cannot handle alone. In such cases, selecting the right team is crucial. Tatiana Mayskaya, Associate Professor at the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences and the International College of Economics and Finance, together with colleagues from foreign universities, examined team characteristics and found that less diverse teams are better suited to objectives where a high average performance is important, whereas more diverse teams are preferable when avoiding failure is critical. The paper has been published in Economic Theory.

Managers regularly face the challenge of building an optimal team. Should team members have similar skills and expertise, or is it better to select individuals with diverse backgrounds? The literature offers differing perspectives: some studies argue that diverse teams are more effective, while others suggest that such teams are more prone to conflict and harder to coordinate.

The authors of the paper developed a formal model showing how the optimal level of skill and expertise diversity in a team depends on its ultimate objective. The researchers distinguish between two types of objectives: in the first, achieving a high average performance is key; in the second, minimising the risk of failure is critical. This, in turn, determines the optimal team composition.

For example, in medicine, it is not sufficient to focus solely on achieving a high average outcome: a failure in a single complex case can harm a patient, leading to lawsuits and serious reputational damage that cannot be offset by successes in other cases. Therefore, a hospital must ensure a minimum acceptable standard of care across different types of patients. In research and innovation-driven projects, the logic is often different: a team’s overall success may hinge on its strongest outcomes—a breakthrough discovery, a high-impact publication, a patent, or a new product—while unsuccessful attempts are treated as part of the search process. A similar dynamic exists in the film industry, where a single hit can offset several less successful projects.

If the objective is to maximise average performance, teams composed of members with similar backgrounds tend to perform better. The notion is not that diversity of skills is harmful, but that when the focus is on average outcomes, it is advantageous for the team to be well aligned with the most common, routine tasks. Accordingly, team members’ expertise should be similar to one another and closely matched to the demands they encounter most frequently: consistently high performance in a large number of cases raises the average more than preparedness for rare, non-standard situations.

Conversely, when avoiding mistakes is critical, diversity becomes an advantage. A team with varied backgrounds is more likely to handle a wide range of problems. For example, a hospital’s emergency department requires specialists with different expertise—trauma physicians, surgeons, anaesthesiologists, and others.

Tatiana Mayskaya

'Organisations often overestimate universal approaches, trying to assign diverse teams to every task. Our paper shows that there is no one-size-fits-all solution; much depends on the objective,' says Tatiana Mayskaya, Associate Professor at the HSE Faculty of Economics and the International College of Economics and Finance. 'To build a team effectively, managers should ask themselves: “do we want to achieve strong average results or avoid failures?” In the former case, all else being equal, a team with similar backgrounds tailored to typical tasks is appropriate; in the latter, a team with a broader range of competencies—better able to cover different scenarios and prevent worst-case outcomes—is optimal.'