Companies and Hockey Teams Use Dirty Tricksters. Here's Why They Shouldn't

BY ANALYZING THE ILLICIT ROLE OF THE ENFORCER IN NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE TEAMS, MOORE AND STUART FIND THAT INCLUDING SHADY CHARACTERS IN A FIRM IS A BAD STRATEGY FOR SUSTAINABLE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE AND A SOURCE OF VULNERABILITY FOR RESILIENT PERFORMANCE

In many companies you can find individuals that occupy informal roles, whose purpose is to carry out illicit activities that support organizational goals. Real life examples include Enron’s former CFO Andy Fastow, who specialized in structured finance transactions that made Enron look healthy when it was anything but, or Wal-Mart Mexico’s Sergio Cicero Zapata, an executive specialized in bribing government officials so that the organization could expand more quickly in the local market.
 
Such characters provide their companies with unfair competitive advantages, act as unofficial problem-solvers, and can be used as scapegoats if the illicit activity is detected. Nevertheless, Celia Moore (Bocconi’s Department of Management and Technology) and Colleen Stuart (Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins University), in Shady Characters: The Implications of Illicit Organizational Roles for Resilient Team Performance (forthcoming in Academy of Management Journal, published online before print, doi: 10.5465/amj.2014.0512) conclude that including such roles in a team is a bad strategy for sustainable competitive advantage and a source of vulnerability for resilient team performance.
 
 
The paper focuses on an illicit role in hockey. As happens in corporations, “hockey teams”, the authors write, “carry out highly interdependent, time-constrained work that requires specialized collective skill”. Furthermore, results are easy to measure. The role, widespread in professional National Hockey League teams, is that of the enforcer. Enforcers are specialists in fighting, a forbidden and punishable offense in professional hockey: they spend little time on the ice, rarely do anything good such as making a solid pass or scoring a goal, and spend a lot of time off the rink in the penalty box.
 
However, hockey teams often include such players because managers believe they contribute to team performance by representing a credible threat of retaliation, thus allowing teammates to skate, pass and shoot without the fear of physical harm.
 
Since hockey players often suffer injuries that prevent them from playing in one or more games, Moore and Stuart can observe how the team performance is affected by an enforcer’s absence, compared to how team performance is affected by the absence of other players. They find that team performance drops more when an enforcer is injured, compared to when other players are injured. The reduction is 11.3% higher on average and statistically significant; in detail, an enforcer’s exit is 11.2% more disruptive than the injury of a captain and 12.9% more than a center, while the only comparable role seems to be the goalie. “This is surprising, given enforcers don’t contribute in any direct way to scoring goals”, Moore says. Moreover, the authors find that a team’s performance recovers more slowly when teams try to replace the enforcer and that the negative effect of an enforcer’s injury increases as a function of the amount of experience he has had with his team.
 
These results suggest that shady characters’ knowledge is tacit, context-specific and difficult to transmit, making them very hard to replace. Organizations that employ specialists in illicit activities may come to depend on them, sort of like a safety blanket, but doing so represents a source of vulnerability when these individuals leave.
 
“More sustainable competitive advantage”, Moore concludes, “is more likely when everyone on the team can contribute in meaningful ways to the organization’s legitimate performance”. 

by Fabio Todesco