Abstract
We analyze the effect of national diversity on sports team performance. Due to language barriers, we expect the team’s productivity to decrease with the number of nationalities, but that the introduction of further nations and further aspects of different cultures might lead to additional skills within the team. We test our hypothesis on a seasonal individual team basis. We do not find that national diversity among team members significantly influences a team’s performance. However, we find that the influence of national diversity on team performance depends on the nature of the underlying task.
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We are grateful to Evan Osborne, Christian Opitz, Michele Morner, participants at WK ORG Workshop 2008 in Munich, participants at the 2007 meeting of the Western Economic Association, and seminar participants at the University of Zurich for helpful comments. We would also like to thank two anonymous referees for their valuable comments and suggestions. Tizoc Bachman, Linda Inderbitzin, and Sabrina Büttler provided excellent research assistance. Financial support from the Swiss National Fund is gratefully acknowledged. Any remaining errors are our own.
See for example the overview in Earley and Mosakowski (2000).
See Milliken and Martins (1996).
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Brandes, L., Franck, E. & Theiler, P. The Effect from National Diversity on Team Production — Empirical Evidence from the Sports Industry. Schmalenbach Bus Rev 61, 225–246 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03396785
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03396785