Quote from the article.
"If you had a superstar performer working at your factory, well, that person could not do [a] better job than the assembly line would allow," Aguinis said. "If you unconstrain the situation and allow people to perform as best as they can, you will see the emergence of a small minority of superstars who contribute a disproportionate amount of the output."
For example, what this means from a work output perspective is that 10% of your programmers do 90% of the work. The work per individual is highly skewed. And I would suspect that the actual output, due to a detailed knowledge of the domain and very good skills, is actually higher. The low productivity of the others is masked by the team adopting the tools and approaches of the top workers, thus making them more productive.
This assumes that the field is amiable to someone being totally unconstrained. In a lot of cases, it is not. Ie, a superstar maintaining buggy code who cannot also re-architect it.
