The influence of team dynamics over a

team’s performance

Mihai-Alexandru Scutaru

BA Year III
 I. Introduction, background and reasons for
the choice of topic and approach

It has always been the aim of every organization, business or otherwise to attract top
talent. However, what has not been the same throughout history, is what the person responsible
for this task, from a ranch owner seeking the best foreman, to a small company owner seeking to
add just a little bit of manpower and hopefully added value with it, to an HR professional at the
helm of a massive recruitment campaign, is their understanding of the notion of “top talent”.
There have been times throughout history, where the term would relate strictly to individual
skill/ability, but nowadays there has been an increase in the prioritizing of soft skills. This came
mostly off the back of two aspects: it is easier to teach one technical skills and the increasing
influence of the company cultures that build off the back of teamwork. Hence talent management
has become a top priority for HR professionals and managers. They, however have yet to
disagree on the exact meaning of this concept.(e.g. Dries, Cotton, Bagdadli, & Oliveira, 2014;
Lewis & Heckman, 2006).

Subsequently, of course once talent is attracted the performance needs to be measured.

The increased emphasis on teamwork especially in the service and IT industries has made this
into quite a challenge, as both individual and collective performances would need to be assessed.
And once either success is achieved, or not, unavoidably a chain of questions emerges: was it off
the back of an individual, of the team? Yes? To what extent? And this last part is particularly
interesting to look at in cases of lack of success or underperforming. Because if the answer is the
team as a whole underperformed, again the situation may branch out in several directions, but
most notably, was there something that occurred mid-project, or was failure unavailable off the
back of poor team dynamics.

And this brings us to the topic at hand: to what extent do team dynamics influence
results? Is a poorly constructed team in terms of dynamics doomed to fail from the get-go or are
other motivation factors or individual abilities capable of off-setting this factor, which is
arguably a disadvantage?

Because the research methodology will involve case studies in the field of e-sports, let’s
have a brief overview of this rising trend. There are several reasons the author has chosen to
study the influence of team dynamics over the team’s performance by taking a look at e-sports.

Firstly, it’s a rising trend, attracting an increasing amount of professional players and as a
result a drastic increase in prize pools. Gamers have been given a chance to earn a living out of
their passion and fans were gifted with the chance to watch displays of incredible skill and speed
by the best of the best. In time, professional commentators, analysts, coaches and sponsors
started to have an increasingly relevant role in the field, thus the overall level of organization,
from the overall scene to each team’s has risen drastically. Nowadays especially the teams with a
long history in e-sports are ran as professional as any business.

Secondly, to build upon the previous point, the modus operandi of sports teams in general
and e-sports team in particular is as close to that of a business as it can get: the purpose is to
make profit, to that extend they need to perform very well, arguably better than a business, as
there are very few sports where profit is to be had by being average or just doing “alright” and to
do that they need to attract top talent and make sure that said top talent is developed to the
maximum. And this is why the focus of this paper will be e-sports. It’s make it or break it, you
either are on top, thus have profit and prestige, or you are not, or as a famous quote from a very
popular series states it “When you play the game of thrones you either win or you die. There is
no middle ground.” Granted, “death” in e-sports rarely translates into bankruptcy but rather into
obscurity, which in many aspects is a greater punishment for the actors involved than one would
be tempted to think.

Moreover, e-sports fans are some of the most demanding stakeholders one can come
across in any industry. They expect nothing but the absolute best from both their favorite teams
and players. A company’s stakeholders may be pleased with being second best or even top 5 in a
market (of course not all of them), but e-sports fans want nothing less than number one.

Last but not least, professional e-sports team, have player homes, dedicated to training
and preparing tournaments, thus taking the demand for proper inter-personal dynamics to a level
above that of a company. In the author’s opinion, while it can be manageable having to work 8
hours a day, 5 days a week with a person one dislikes and the feeling from the other end is
mutual, having to live with that person just amplifies the challenge presented to professional
gamers to the tenth power.

II. Literature review

The fact that achievements and IQ tests can fail to highlight soft skills (Heckman, Kautz,
2012) is among the factors that caused the HR professionals to start shifting away from such
assessments.
Earlier, it has been pointed out that “soft skills fulfil an important role in shaping an
individual’s personality” (Schulz 2008). Even if the said paper is written in a different context,
the point stands true and it heavily influences the performance of a potential candidate at an
interview.
An even earlier work reinforces the point about the importance collaboration. Nowadays,
most companies don’t want employees who are there to just “do their jobs.” What they want is
people who will make them profitable. And since profit is most likely to increase when “teams”
of co‐workers who collaborate on short‐ or long‐term projects, or even permanently, companies
are more interested in those who can fit this type of work structure (Johnson, P., Heimann,
V. and O’Neill, K. (2000).
While the availability and ability to collect data has allowed for great advancements
sports usually lack viable theoretical framework (Travassos,Davids, Araújo & Esteves April
2017). This is why the methods that will be used further on for this paper focus on observations,
case studies, the common sense and know-how specific to the activity, as whatever crisis of
theoretical framework regular sports may face, the situation is even direr in the case of e-sports.
Yes they evolve spectacularly fast, but not in that direction and they are still many, many steps
behind.
An exception to this is “Team vs. Team: Success Factors in a Multiplayer Online Battle
Arena Game (Niedhart, 2015)”, a paper that deals with many factors regarding team
composition, functionality which is paramount to a team’s success. This paper will serve as one
of the most solid footholds to support this research.

III. Research methods

The primary research method employed will be case studies on various e-sports teams,
namely Dota 2 teams. Valve’s Dota2 is widely accepted by the gaming community as the game
with the best developed competitive scene. In recent years the prize pools at “The International”
(for those new to eSports, consider this the equivalent of the World Cup in whichever classical
sport you prefer; also for the rest of the paper the tournament shall be referred to as “TI”),
supported by only a small community that varies in between 10 to 12 million players worldwide,
have soared from the 18 million$ prize pool at TI5 (2015) to the current world record of 34
million $ at TI9 (2019), (according to esporstsearnings.com). There is also no “intruder” in the
top 5: first five places belong to TI9 to TI5. Basically the TI prize pool has been surpassing its
own records starting TI3 and onwards (as the first two TI’s had a prize pool of only 1.6 million $
offered by Valve). So with more and more money on the line, eSports organizations in Dota2
became increasingly involved with the actual players, bringing in coaches, increasing the number
of boot camps, building player homes and of course, data analysis became an increasingly
relevant part of a coach’s contribution to preparing a tournament and some teams even have a
data analyst working on that alone, so that the coach may focus his efforts in other areas.
What this means is that what will actually be analyzed for example will be a team’s
performance at a certain tournament when something went wrong with the team chemistry, and
benchmarked against its performance before the said event. Thankfully, despite a relevant history
of only 9 years, there is plenty to choose from. This will be done by the use of both interviews
the players gave at that point in time, social media posts or forum articles (though only
comments by players themselves, managers of the team and from the Dota2 analysts will be
considered relevant, fan comments, of course excluded).
 Another useful source of information will be a documentary series by Valve, named
TrueSight, which takes a look at certain players or teams with special occasions from their
perspective.
Last but not least, one cannot evaluate performance without using metrics. Alan “Nahaz”
Bester is a former associate professor at several American institutes of higher education, where
he taught statistics related subjects. Often referred to his fellow casters and analysts and by the
rest of the community alike as “the stats guy”, he has created a website/platform (datdota.com)
that has recordings of all player’s in-game metrics throughout history. It is these metrics that will
be used to evaluate if any conflicts, or any lack of real team dynamics have indeed contributed
negatively to a team’s performance.
It should be mentioned that the cases that will be looked at will not necessarily involve
negative results, as per a point brought up in the introduction, it is possible that other factors
could have offset the dynamics issues and ended up with a more positive effect. Of course until
proven through metrics, any claims the players may have made about the topic will not be
considered having merit.
To the point of the previous paragraph, a particular case will be studied where, when all
the facts are put together, the winning team went through processes and experiences that appear
to go completely against the better part of the expected results, although to be fair, studying the
favorites’ performance at the same tournament goes with rather than against the expected results.

IV. Time frame

Topic reflection: 1 day July 2019
Preliminary reading:1 week 2nd of December -9th of December
Deciding on method: 1 day July 2019
Deciding on hypothesis: 1week January 6h-January 13th
Writing literature review: 3 days: January 12th – January 15th
Collecting data: 1 1/2months March 1st – April 15th
Analyzing the data: 1 1/2months April 15th- May 1st
First draft: to be completed by June 10th
Editing: Deadline June 15th
Contingency time June 15th- June 28th

V. Conclusions and expected results

In the author’s opinion, given the potential highlighted by the literature and the
similarities between the e-sports environment and the business environment, the findings of this
research could provide some very useful insight for managers and HR professionals with regards
to managing the top talent that they seek to attract.
What the author expects to find is that merely having top talent simply does not cut it in
such a competitive environment, and that baring some exceptional cases, maybe a unique type of
ability, proper team dynamics and a proper working environment will end up yielding better
results than individual abilities. This just seeks to prove that the current modus operandi of HR
professionals that often choose to sacrifice the overall level of individual hard skills of the
company’s talent, in favor of soft skills and team work is the right way to go about it.

References
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2012.05.014
https://www.datdota.com/players/performances?default=true
https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/13665620010332813
https://doi.org/10.1080/24748668.2013.11868633
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Noshir_Contractor/publication/291363066_Team_vs_Team_Succ
ess_Factors_in_a_Multiplayer_Online_Battle_Arena_Game/links/56cc8cd908ae1106370d9a40.pdf