Channeling personal initiative through team coordination: A heat map analysis of soccer players’ aggregate behavioral initiative

Personal initiative is an influential individual-level construct but less is yet known about team initiative’s functioning and influence on team performance. This work addresses the nature and function of team initiative—a form of proactive behavior that is self-starting, future-focused, and intended to overcome barriers to goal achievement to solve team problems or facilitate team success—and how it relates to team performance. Drawing from the human capital resources perspective, we argue that team initiative only enhances team performance insofar as team members’ personal initiative efforts can be integrated into team processes and transformed into valuable team resources. Based on this perspective, we posit team coordination as the key emergence-enabling mechanism between team initiative and team performance. We also argue that teams can experience “too much of a good thing” with respect to team initiative and theorize that teams have a diminishing capacity to coordinate initiative to resolve team task demands. We test these expectations using satellite-derived player heat map data and team passing network matrices from the 2014 and 2018 FIFA Men’s World Cups. Our findings reveal that team coordination mediates the relationship between team initiative and team performance, but with diminishing marginal benefits of increased team initiative.