I'm pretty sure that the whole notion of A-players, B-players etc is just an easy way for people in dysfunctional teams to put the blame on those idiots they ha

I'm pretty sure that the whole notion of A-players, B-players etc is just an easy way for people in dysfunctional teams to put the blame on those idiots they have to work with. Some people work great as a team; some don't. There's no magic formula that will predict that. Classifying people as A-, B-players etc assumes there is some well-ordered relation describing the productivity of employees; but such a thing does not exist. There are people with good leadership skills, people who are great when guided, people who prefer working on their own. Some know every tiny technical detail of the platform they work with, some have a talent for hacks that work great in practice. If you try measuring all these people on an arbitrary one-dimensional scale, and pick only the A-players, you'll more likely then not end up with another dysfunctional team (but someone will then just measure along a different axis and declare that the team failed because of all those B-players)