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.
From: Chengzhi Zhang [view email]
[v1]
Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:42:45 UTC (1,133 KB)
此内容由惯性聚合(RSS阅读器)自动聚合整理，仅供阅读参考。 原文来自 — 版权归原作者所有。