Disentangling E-sports Team Tactical Recipes: A Configurational Perspective

Research on e-Sports teams is gaining momentum. Yet, despite a small but growing body of work that investigates how team formation affects performance in e-Sports, the bulk of extant literature has primarily accentuated the effects of individualized factors on team performance while neglecting the nature of e-sports competition as a causally complex phenomenon. Consistent with the configurational view, this research-in-progress advances a research model that seeks to unveil how different types of team composition in conjunction with teams’ tactical implementation impact eventual outcomes. Specifically, we divide team strategy configuration into two components: before-game team composition and in-game tactical implementation. Contextualizing extant literature on team composition to e-sports setting, we delineate team composition into four types (i.e., individual offensive, collective offensive, individual defensive, and collective defensive composition) and divide tactical implementation into three dimensions (i.e., specialization, isolation, and advancing speed). To empirically validate our hypothesized relationships, we outline our plans for employing fuzzy sets qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to analyze data gathered for a popular Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) game.