I swiped the Roman Evaluation Method from Luke Hohmann. During interviews, a No from one is a No from all. Self selecting teams is one of those agile advices.
If your prickly superstar was chosen collectively, he would have been given a lot of latitude. Eyes wide open kinda thing.
The only sticky interpersonal problems I've had is when some higher ranking genius assigns people to my teams, mostly unwanted and unwelcome.
And sometimes just plan bad soup. People good individually, bad together. Like when the boss assigned an outspoken Lebonese and an outspoken Israeli to my team. They got along as well as peanut butter and lug nuts.
Next thing that happens is people start choosing members based on how much comfortable they are (which doesn't translate into technical skills and delivering stuff) or start talking to each other, trying to convince people.. this sucks!
While it might work for small companies with not much variation in technical skills and sociability between employees.. for anything else it's kinda hard.
Plus, that initial list of 2-3 employees that start talking and picking others was selected by someone, wasn't it? And the list that they can pick from was also selected, no?
I think if you need a team of 10 and you have 30 possibly good candidates within your company (and they are all available to move to your team).. sure, why not. You as a manager already pre-selects a bunch of people and then let your team members filter it even further.
But putting that responsibility from the beginning solely on the team members.. I guess that's risky. But anyway, how often does that happen?
If we are talking about selecting 1-2 people for a already formed team than fine.. of course other team members should do it (but that's mostly the norm in a lot of companies.. the manager/tech lead runs the resumes through people he/she trusts, ask them to participate in interviews.. no big difference there).
How? What makes you so sure you weren't biased?
How? He wrote a ton of great code in a short period of time that worked amazingly well. How else would you tell somebody was productive and skilled?
But, think whatever you want!
In the situations I indicated I was also a developer on the team so I knew how productive and skilled the 10x prickly developer was. His peers ranked him high on technical skills but only as high as more amicable and lessor skilled peers.
I'm not saying I ignored the social aspect, in fact that is why I called him "prickly". I'm just saying that, while his teamwork related areas were properly low, his technical areas were improperly low because of this halo effect.