What hiring managers can learn from the NFL draft

For even the casual football fan, Gatorade's new commercial tribute to former NFL quarterback Peyton Manning is pretty moving. Launched online just before the start of the NFL draft Thursday, it features people from the recently retired Hall of Famer's life - his brother, his father, his famous friends, as well as a number of former coaches and teammates - reading aloud from letters Manning wrote them over the years.

The commercial never shows him take a snap, or throw a ball into the end zone. Instead, it remembers him for his generous handwritten thank you notes, paying tribute to a player whose leadership and work ethic will be remembered as much as his physical skills.

Those traits aren't just something for a sentimental Gatorade ad, however. Players who are known for having "team player" attributes - those who take rookies under their wing, who spend a lot of time watching film, who are known for spending extra time in the weight room - were picked earlier in the draft and paid more, according to a study published by the Journal of Applied Psychology.

After controlling for factors such as physical prowess and the competitiveness of a player's college conference, the researchers found that team-oriented behaviors were just as good at predicting success in the draft - as well as performance over their NFL careers - as how many tackles they had or passes they threw on the field.

"An NFL wide receiver is hired to catch passes and score touchdowns," said Timothy Maynes, an assistant professor at the University at Buffalo School of Management who co-authored the study. "But doing things above and beyond: It's something that's at a personal cost to me, something I do that's beyond expectations and should have positive impact on team performance."

Maynes and his co-author, Steven Whiting of the University of Central Florida, examined 440 draft picks who played two positions - wide receiver and linebacker - and went through the NFL draft between 2006 and 2012. To measure off-the-field character traits, they poured through 26,000 news stories during the players' college careers, scanning for phrases and quotes that illustrated team-driven behavior, coming up with a "contextual performance" score that tallied up references to those character traits.

Though an imperfect way of measuring character, Maynes said the analysis clearly shows a correlation between players who have a reputation for team-first behaviors and both higher draft picks and future NFL performance.

"Of course as you'd expect the on-field performance [to be] a significant predictor," Maynes said. "But so was our measure of contextual performance ... It was at least equally as important to the evaluation."

The study also examined the rankings from draft analysts from media outlets, and found that by not taking such team-oriented behaviors into account, as team managers and owners do, the rankings weren't as predictive of the draft picks' future performance as the insiders who made the selections.

"The funny thing is when you hear them doing the analysis, they'll talk about it the intangibles, but it doesn't make it into their evaluation," Maynes said.

While the NFL may not be the average workplace, the study is a reminder for managers that output and raw numbers only go so far in predicting how valuable an employee will be.

"In today's business world, it's becoming significantly more important that a job candidate is capable of functioning well in teams," Maynes said. More companies, he said, could improve how well they include team-oriented behaviors when selecting people for their jobs. "The practices in industry when they're selecting people have to shift along with the emphasis on teams."