The authors also suggest that companies should strive for more equity in pay, to increase synchronized effort. Because individual effort by key people isn’t enough.
They may have a point. The U.S. Army pays everyone, good or bad, the same, and it is the best in the world. But current military and veterans will laugh if a humanities academic suggests it it more efficient or cooperative because of equal pay. Instead, they will tell the stories of all the people their unit had to carry, because it’s not a meritocracy and reductions only happen at promotion tiers.
Image: Storyblocks
The authors reached their conclusion by focusing on pay differences among important players, so the 14th player on a team was not compared to the highest paid. They do not try to argue that Minnesota Timberwolves shooting guard Anthony Edwards should reduce his salary so Dario Šarić of the Sacramento Kings can play more. They instead argue income inequality among people in the core will hurt their chances.
NBA basketball is a good test case because it is a team sport where there is a sort-of salary cap, which means salaries always rise and so there will always be disparity, but superstars matter. It is a time-honored strategy to have three key players and then everyone else that fits the budget and role. It is a sport with nearly as much objective quantification as baseball. Their data sets were NBA teams from the 2009-2010 and 2019-2020 seasons.
To examine the core, they used the five players with the most minutes per game. The stratification for performance was games won while their standard for group effort was how well players rebounded and got the percentage of loose balls – when both teams want to grab. Cooperation was identified as the team’s defensive rating, which is the most subjective metric in sports(1) and will be a confounder for people reading this.
They found that greater pay disparities was correlated to less coordination. It didn’t show up in the win-loss record but it did in defensive effort. They posit that salary compression – when new hires come in at high salaries while existing employees who don’t job hop remain about the same – is the reason. So a veteran on the team may try less because the new person is paid so much more.
It’s a more compelling argument in something like software programming than it is sports. Everyone in the NBA is competitive, they were the best player on their team at some point in the past, they don’t resent someone who joins getting paid more. That is instead a European mentality; the old economics goes that if an American sees someone with a Cadillac, they think ‘I will make money and get a Cadillace’ while when a European sees one they think ‘why should he have a Cadillac?’
Everyone wants a Cadillac in sports and everyone in sports knows ‘defense ain’t where the Cadillacs are.’ Not in the NBA. Not in the NFL. Sorry football brains, ‘defense wins championships’ is rarely true, you still have to score more points. Not even in baseball, the only American sport (cricket does also) where the defense literally has the ball.
No one tries in sports less because someone else makes more money, they instead try more so that they can make more money. Defensive is the most fuzzy way to try and link income to outcome but it is certainly interesting to wonder in what ways team chemistry is quantifiable.
Citation: Beus, J. M., Parkinson, S. M.,&Bates, J. T. (2026). Show Them the Money? Better Do it Fairly: The Effects of Pay Inequity in a Team’s Strategic Core. Human Performance, 39(1), 23–41. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08959285.2025.2601951
NOTES:
(1) Cal Ripken Jr. finished his career with a .979 fielding percentage as a shortstop while Ozzie Smith had .978, yet defensively Smith was so far ahead of everyone in his peer group it’s silly to think Ripken fielded better even if his number is higher. Instead, Smith had much greater range, by a lot, so if he didn’t get something it was called an error, while most shortstops would never have had a chance of getting to it so it would have been called a hit for them. Had he kept his range shorter, he’d never have missed a ball.