Abstract for:Will Talented Outliers Help Improve Team Performance? The Significance of Feedback Learning

In many working groups, there exist certain people that are talented but under-disciplined, who can sometimes make extraordinary contributions for the team, but often have less satisfactory overall performance. It'll be interesting to investigate whether the existence of such people in a team do help improve overall team performance, and if they do so under certain conditions, to understand through which channel they help the team. This study proposes an analytical model with a stochastic nature that set up an environment to study these questions. Two main results are derived: (1) the feedback learning mechanism is a sound candidate channel through which the positivity in favor of the existence of such outliers can hold true; (2) different types of teamwork settings have different outlier-positivity conditions, and the model demonstrates that for two specific types of teamwork settings, the sports games are more outlier-friendly than non-sports organizational work, which is consistent with common observation.