Exploring the impact of specialist and generalist stars on organizational performance

Georgios Nalbantis, Christian Manger, Tim Pawlowski and Philip Yang

PLOS ONE, 2026, vol. 21, issue 5, 1-23

Abstract: We analyze the impact of specialist and generalist stars on organizational performance by linking the literature on star employees and specialization. Our adaptive role framework allows stars to switch roles over time. We develop a game-theoretical model to derive hypotheses and to empirically test them using basketball data. Consistent with theoretical predictions, the results show that teams with generalist stars outperform those with specialists. While a generalist switching to a specialist role always worsens performance, a specialist switching to a generalist role may improve performance. Additional estimations suggest that these findings hold for teams relying on a unique star rather than multiple stars.

Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0349682 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 49682&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0349682

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0349682

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().