Do more heads imply better performance? An empirical study of team thought leaders' impact on scientific team performance

2026-06-24

AI Summary

This study addresses the unclear relationship between the number of intellectual leaders in scientific teams and team performance, measured in terms of scholarly impact and disruptiveness. Leveraging contribution statements from over 140,000 papers in PLOS, the authors identify individuals responsible for conceptual tasks as intellectual leaders and employ causal inference and moderation models to examine how their quantity influences outcomes. The analysis reveals, for the first time, an inverted U-shaped relationship between the number of intellectual leaders and impact, indicating an optimal range that maximizes influence; however, increasing their number consistently diminishes the disruptiveness of outputs. Furthermore, while international collaboration enhances impact, it concurrently suppresses disruptiveness. These findings provide crucial empirical evidence for optimizing the composition and organization of research teams.

Abstract

Thought leadership plays a crucial role in boosting team performance; thus, teams with more thought leaders may perform better. However, the impact of the number of thought leaders on team performance in a scientific context remains understudied. In this study, we consider the authors of a publication as a scientific team and define authors responsible for conceptual tasks, such as conceived and designed the experiments in the PLOS contribution statement classification system, as thought leaders. Leveraging more than 140,000 papers from PLOS journals, we examine the relationship between the number of thought leaders and two aspects of team performance, namely team impact and team disruptiveness, from both correlational and causal perspectives. The results show that (1) an inverted U-shaped relationship exists between the number of thought leaders and team impact, and (2) teams with more thought leaders tend to produce less disruptive ideas. We also explore how international collaboration, team size, and gender diversity interact with the number of thought leaders in shaping team performance, and find that (3) international collaboration improves team impact but lowers the disruptiveness of team outputs. This study advances scholarly understanding of thought leadership in scientific teams and provides valuable insights for policymakers and team managers.

Problem

• thought leadership
• scientific team performance
• team impact
• disruptiveness
• team composition

Innovation

• thought leadership
• team performance
• scientific collaboration
• disruptiveness
• inverted U-shaped relationship