Why All-Star Teams May Fail: Organizational Recombination of Individual Social Capital.

Professional and efficient interdisciplinary team building beyond organizational boundaries is becoming an increasingly important issue. (e.g. Vaccine development teams during pandemic) In practice, these decisions are often made by experts as principal investigators(PI), but the mechanism of the issue is not much discussed and studied from an organizational perspective. One important question is: Does gathering the most influential individuals make us better teams?There are many intuitive answers to this question, but few offer a reasonable explanation. Supporters of an “all-star overwhelms” view holds the idea that gathering influential individuals tend to bring in richer social capital, and by making good use of these social capital performance of the teams can eventually be positively enhanced.We argue that although individual social capital (ISC) and organizational social capital (OSC) are both embedded in interpersonal relationships, the approaches by and goals of individuals and organizations in forming their respective social resources are very different, which leads to significant heterogeneity between these two kinds of social capitals. When it comes to interdisciplinary team-building, unlike traditional organizations, teams that are organized on individual basis within short time period are in fact missing this whole critical process to construct organizational social capital of its own, but instead have to rely on and to recombine individual social capital of their members at the initial stages to complete the necessary inter-organizational capital integration and resource mobilization.We argue that individuals adjust their collaborating strategies according to their status of influence, which results in different aggregation level of their ISC structures. To be specific, researchers with the highest or lowest influence power tend to build ISC with higher aggregation level. We further argue that it will be difficult for the teams to effectively convert these resources easily into effective OSC if ISC aggregation level is too high. These arguments lead to an inference that ”all-star” team building of renowned individuals with high influence power may hinder the process of social capital recombination and thus may not lead to ideal results.We extracted and analyzed the co-authorship networks based on information extracted from 82 Clinical Trials records of Covid-19 vaccine development trials. We find that both individuals in high- and low-influence status build social resource structures that are biased toward high aggregation level, and that the level of ISC aggregation eventually leads to a low level of OSC transformation success on team level. This study examines this issue to provide a mechanistic explanation for the effectiveness of influential individual pooling strategies and to provide empirical recommendations on team building methods for team-building needs.