"In search of David Ross"

I want to continue the theme I started last time with "He's the glue...".  There is no question in my mind that all teams, regardless of the industry, need role players ("glue guys" and "glue gals") - someone like Shane Battier.  Or David Ross.  David Ross is currently the Manager of the Chicago Cubs, but he also spent 15 seasons as a player in the Major Leagues, winning the World Series for the Boston Red Sox in 2013 and the Chicago Cubs in 2016.  He has been the Manager for the Cubs since the 2020 season.

On paper, Ross looks like he was an average player.  He was always more of a back-up catcher than a starter, appearing in only 883 games over his 15 year career (that's just over 58 games per 162-game season).  Statistically speaking, his life-time batting average was 0.229, and he hit only 106 home runs and batted in 314 runs.  However, as a teammate, Ross was routinely described as someone who made everyone around him better.  In other words, just like Shane Battier, David Ross was a "glue guy".  

If there is such a thing as "team chemistry" (and I believe that there is - see "Chemistry is Culture", "Superstars and the mess in Cleveland", "That's what being a Boilermaker is all about", "Chemistry Magic", and "There's no 'I' in team"), then the "magic elixir" that produces it has to be having role players like Shane Battier and David Ross on the team.  Unfortunately, the impact that these role players have on "team chemistry" and ultimately on how the team performs can be difficult to quantify.  Scott Brave, R. Andrew Butters, and Kevin Roberts were able to do exactly that (at least for Major League Baseball) in their paper, "In search of David Ross".  They use some fancy analytics and eventually settle on a regression model that uses a well-known baseball statistic called the "wins above replacement" or WAR.  These investigators report that there is on average a 20 percent variance between a team’s actual win total and the cumulative WAR of all the players on that team. Their analysis attributes half of that 20 percent variance to what they call "team chemistry".

If "team chemistry" has been called the "Holy Grail of performance analytics" in sports, imagine how hard it is to develop an objective measure of "team chemistry" in organizations outside sports!  Given the importance of "team chemistry" to an organization's success, coming up with an objective measure of "team chemistry" seems like an incredibly important area for further research.  Until that time, however, we will be stuck with more subjective measures, which will be necessary to build an effective, high performing team.  Remember, we need role players as much as, if not more, than we need superstars.