The Role of Team Context on Performance Signals for Human Capital Resource Market Value

Authors: Prisca Brosi, Marvin Schuth, Nicholas Folger, Robert Ployhart, Gilad Chen

This research seeks to understand how the team context affects the market value of individual human capital resources. Specifically, we integrate signaling theory with the strategic human capital resource and team literatures to examine how team performance signals can distort or influence the market signals provided by individual performance and tenure. Using large, multi-year and multi-level data from the top five European professional football leagues, the results largely support the hypothesized meso-level model. Team performance sends an additional positive signal for individual’s market value and strengthens the individual performance signal. Tenure, in contrast, sends a negative signal on individual’s market value. Team performance distorts the negative signal of tenure, such that tenure is negatively related to market value on high performing teams but positively related on low performing teams. Finally, tenure weakens the individual performance signal. Together, these findings extend understanding how market values are formed by using a meso-level approach demonstrating that team membership sends independent and distorting signals on individual’s market values.

Prof. Dr. Prisca Brosi is Associate Professor of Human Resource Management at the KLU. She studied industrial engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Having finished her studies with a diploma in 2006, she worked for three years as a consultant for the Boston Consulting Group. Dr. Brosi did her Doctorate in 2012 directly followed by her Habilitation studies at the Technical University Munich. During this time, she has been a visiting researcher at the Hong Kong Polytechnical University and the New York University.