Business lessons from ball-team studies

When it comes to lab rats for management profs in need of business-research subjects, nothing compares to baseball players.

"Baseball's a business, just a very public one," said associate business professor Chester Spell, who teaches organizational development at Rutgers University in Camden.

For several years, Spell, 54, has been studying diversity on baseball teams and how the formation of subgroups within a team affects success.

Does it help that teams like the Phillies and the Yankees have ethnic subgroups, or groups of veteran players, or groups from the same country?

Do these various groups add to the team's success, or do the fault lines between them create friction that ultimately detracts from the ability to win a World Series?

The beauty of this research? Spell and his student assistants don't have to make the players chase cheese in a maze to get results.

Not in a sport that keeps the kinds of exhaustive statistics that baseball does.

"You can find all sorts of objective measures" of team and individual performance, Spell said. "And there's lots of very public information about their backgrounds and how they perform and relate [to teammates] in the news."

The students look at the news and the stats, putting all the information on spreadsheets and analyzing it.

An early conclusion, based on one year's research: Teams that have strong and cohesive subgroups are more successful than those without strong subgroups.

The strongest groups, said Spell - sitting in his office with a Phillies cap on his desk (even though he's really a Braves fan) - have multiple common characteristics. For example, a group of players who are both young and Hispanic is stronger than a group that is only Hispanic.

"It sounds like a bad thing - that the team is split up into groups and it might not perform well," he said. "But under certain conditions, the research suggests that these groups will actually be a good thing for performance."

That's because group members can support one another, he said. "They provide kind of a comfort zone."

Spell likes to tell the story of how star Japanese pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka chose to play with the Boston Red Sox.

The pitcher reported that the presence of another Japanese employee in the Red Sox organization - a person who wasn't even a player - influenced his decision. Later, Junichi Tazawa, another Japanese player, joined the Bosox.

Even though Spell's research does not slice and dice groups this way, the professor thinks the Phillies' practice of pulling players from its farm system fosters a strong subgroup.

"I'm certain that these players have known each other and have a lot in common."

The takeaway for businesses, Spell said, is that companies shouldn't be afraid of strong groups forming within their corporate culture. "They have a safe harbor" where they can help each other adjust.

But, he said, it is imperative to throw these groups together in the workplace - just as subgroups within the pitching staff are thrown together in the bullpen.

The easiest way to achieve comfort is for them to be in constant and close contact, he said.

"Any business is going to have fault lines," he said. "It's not something you can erase or ignore. And there are aspects that can be positive."

So far, Spell said, he and his colleague Katerina Bezrukova, a former Rutgers psychology professor who now teaches in California, are still collecting data and perfecting the mathematical models for analysis.

Meantime, he plans to watch the World Series. Spell may be a lukewarm Phillies fan, but he definitely will not be rooting for the Yankees.

"Oh no, no, no," said Spell, who lived for years in Georgia and now lives in Camden. "Not after the mid-'90s, when the Braves lost two World Series to the Yankees."