Every­one Loves a Generalist

Yet the major­i­ty of three-point shoot­ers in the game are rarely accord­ed much acclaim. Indeed, accord­ing to Sports Illus­trat­ed, for sev­er­al years even Kerr was ​“a guy who went vir­tu­al­ly unre­cruit­ed because he couldn’t jump and was two steps slow.” Is it true that three point shoot­ers, despite pos­sess­ing a rel­a­tive­ly rare skillset, are under­val­ued by coach­es and fans?

Man­agers and Fans Min­i­mize Spe­cial­ists’ Contributions

Long Wang, an avid bas­ket­ball fan, had long won­dered just this. He approached his then doc­tor­al advi­sor, Kei­th Murnighan, a pro­fes­sor of man­age­ment and orga­ni­za­tions at the Kel­logg School of Man­age­ment. The pair decid­ed to inves­ti­gate: might we have a bias toward gen­er­al­ists, who pos­sess a wide range of skills, over spe­cial­ists, who have nar­row but deep expertise?

Wang, now an assis­tant pro­fes­sor at the City Uni­ver­si­ty of Hong Kong, and Murnighan put their the­o­ry to the test. In a series of stud­ies, the researchers indeed found evi­dence of a bias in favor of generalists.

In one study, Wang and Murnighan used salary and per­for­mance data for over 300 NBA play­ers to find that, on aver­age, the three-point spe­cial­ists’ salaries are tied not to their three-point shoot­ing, but to their two-point shoot­ing — even though their three-point shoot­ing has the big­ger impact on their team’s per­for­mance. In oth­er words, these spe­cial­ists, unlike their gen­er­al­ist team­mates, are not com­pen­sat­ed based on the actu­al role they play in their teams’ success.

But don’t go blam­ing the NBA pro­fes­sion­als; reg­u­lar fans are also like­ly to dis­count three-point spe­cial­ists. In anoth­er study, Wang and Murnighan asked fans to imag­ine that they were the gen­er­al man­ag­er of an NBA team in need of a good three-point shoot­er. The par­tic­i­pants were shown three play­er pro­files: Which would they recruit, and how much should each be paid? The par­tic­i­pants were more inclined to recruit and com­pen­sate the gen­er­al­ist (whose two- and three-point shoot­ing were both above aver­age) over the three-point spe­cial­ist (whose three-point shoot­ing was excep­tion­al, but whose over­all scor­ing was below aver­age). ​“Because the instruc­tions empha­sized that the team need­ed a three-point shoot­er, favor­ing the gen­er­al­ist was evi­dence of a gen­er­al­ist bias,” the researchers write.

The Haz­ards of Direct Comparisons

What could be going on? Why do three-point­er spe­cial­ists seem to get short shrift, even when, for a par­tic­u­lar role, they add more val­ue to their team than would anoth­er generalist?

For one, Murnighan explains, we have a nat­ur­al ten­den­cy to com­pare peo­ple against one anoth­er — and when we com­pare three-point spe­cial­ists to over­all stars, they look ter­ri­ble. ​“Do you want five supe­ri­or ath­letes, or one clunky, non­jump­ing, great-shoot­ing three-point shoot­er and four great ath­letes? In fact, the five great ones — on aver­age — might each be bet­ter than this guy, but as a team you do bet­ter when you have a role play­er who can do some­thing special.”

It is a ten­den­cy that extends to the work­place as well. In anoth­er study, Long and Murnighan found that par­tic­i­pants pos­ing as hir­ing man­agers over­looked the spe­cial­ist bet­ter equipped to fill the job at hand in favor of a gen­er­al­ist with more over­all experience.

Anoth­er study exam­ined job ads post­ed to Mon­ster and Career­builder. How many com­pa­nies, the researchers won­dered, would adver­tise for a true spe­cial­ist? They found that even posi­tions flagged for spe­cial­ists asked appli­cants to have skillsets in two dis­tinct domains about 36% of the time. More­over, larg­er orga­ni­za­tions — those orga­ni­za­tions best poised to take advan­tage of spe­cial­ists’ unique skillsets — were more like­ly to demand mul­ti­ple skillsets from their spe­cial­ists than small­er organizations.

Man­agers Must Learn to Conduct

Man­agers are myopic, says Murnighan. In an ide­al world, a hir­ing man­ag­er would be like a con­duc­tor, stand­ing on a podi­um, baton in hand, know­ing how many vio­lin­ists, vio­lists, cel­lists, and horn play­ers are need­ed to pre­vent Beethoven from sound­ing tin­ny. ​“When you’re hir­ing all at once, it’s real­ly easy to see exact­ly what you might need,” he says. But, of course, most teams are formed one play­er at a time, and for man­agers ​“on the ground, inti­mate­ly involved,” he says, ​“it’s much hard­er to see that. And that’s when imme­di­ate com­par­isons run in and you just aren’t going to val­ue a spe­cial­ist as much as you should.”

Anoth­er fac­tor may also con­tribute to the gen­er­al­ist bias: risk aver­sion. ​“If I was the gen­er­al man­ag­er of a bas­ket­ball team, it would be easy for me to jus­ti­fy hir­ing one great ath­lete after the next because you can [jus­ti­fy] their indi­vid­ual sta­tis­tics real­ly well,” says Murnighan. But focus­ing on syn­er­gy — rather than any giv­en indi­vid­ual — is riski­er: ​“When you have a high-risk, high-return strat­e­gy ver­sus a mid­dle-of-the-road, safer strat­e­gy, peo­ple will often take that.” Indeed, this may at least part­ly explain why large cor­po­ra­tions — with their greater empha­sis on account­abil­i­ty — seem more biased toward gen­er­al­ists than small­er ones.

Final­ly, as man­age­ment requires peo­ple to wear many hats — cheer­leader, enforcer, orga­niz­er, goal-set­ter — many man­agers are them­selves gen­er­al­ists. This too works against spe­cial­ists. ​“We real­ly are attract­ed to like-mind­ed oth­er peo­ple,” explains Murnighan. ​“And so we tend to repli­cate ourselves.”

A few words of advice for man­agers? Try to keep the com­par­isons between gen­er­al­ists and spe­cial­ists to a min­i­mum. (Indeed, in some of Wang and Murnighan’s stud­ies, the researchers found that the gen­er­al­ist bias can be reduced when par­tic­i­pants are encour­aged to judge spe­cial­ists on their own terms, as opposed to com­par­ing them to gen­er­al­ists.) And above all, says Murnighan, be that con­duc­tor: ​“There I am, there’s my team, let me look at the inter­ac­tions from a dis­tance and say, ​‘What is it that I need to change? What do I know that I’m too close to the process to real­ly see?’”