The Desire to Be Missed: Irreplaceability and Leadership in Teams

Organizations want their members valuable and replaceable; members who value being missed may prefer to be valuable because they are irreplaceable. This paper studies a team in which members choose productive effort and replaceability investments such as documentation, cross-training, and succession preparation. The desire to be missed makes a member want her absence to matter, raising effort but making replaceability costly because becoming replaceable means leaving a smaller void. The result is a tradeoff between motivation and resilience. When work is loosely connected, the effort gain can dominate; when tightly connected, the same motive undermines the backup the team most needs. Leadership sharpens this tradeoff. Concentrating dependence on a coordination hub raises material welfare because she backs up the largest void most heavily, but once the desire becomes strong enough to collapse backup, the same hub becomes the team's largest point of failure.