Ability Dispersion and Team Performance: a field experiment

This paper studies the impact of diversity in cognitive ability among members of a team on their performance. We conduct a large field experiment in which teams start up and manage real companies under identical circumstances. Exogenous variation in - otherwise random - team composition is imposed by assigning individuals to teams based on their measured cognitive abilities. The setting is one of business management practices in the longer run where tasks are diverse and involve complex decision-making. We propose a model in which greater ability dispersion generates greater knowledge for a team, but also increases the costs of monitoring necessitated by moral hazard. Consistent with the predictions of our model, we find that team performance as measured in terms of sales, profits and profits per share first increases, and then decreases, with ability dispersion. Teams with a moderate degree of ability dispersion also experience fewer dismissals due to fewer shirking members in those teams

A Field Experiment

One of the most salient and relevant dimensions of team heterogeneity is cultural back- ground. We measure the impact of cultural diversity on the performance of business teams using a eld experiment. Companies are set up by teams of undergraduate students in business studies in realistic though similar circumstances. We vary the cultural composition of otherwise randomly composed teams in a multi-cultural stu- dent population. Our data indicate that a moderate level of cultural diversity has no e ect on team performance in terms of business outcomes (sales, pro ts and pro ts per share). However, if at least the majority of team members is culturally diverse then more cultural diversity seems to a ect the performance of teams positively. Our data suggest that this might be related to the more diverse pool of relevant knowledge facilitating (mutual) learning within culturally diverse teams

Ability Dispersion and Team Performance

What is the effect of dispersed levels of cognitive ability of members of a (business) team on their team's performance? This paper reports the results of a field experiment in which 573 students in 49 teams start up and manage real companies under identical circumstances. We ensured exogenous variation in - otherwise random - team composition by assigning students to teams based on their measured cognitive abilities (Raven test). Each team performs a variety of tasks, often involving complex decision making. The key result of the experiment is that the performance of business teams first increases and then decreases with ability dispersion. We seek to understand this finding by developing a model in which team members of different ability levels form sub-teams with other team members with similar ability levels to specialize in different productive tasks. Diversity spreads production over different tasks in order to escape diminishing marginal returns under specialization. The model comes with a boundary condition: our experimental finding is most likely to emerge in settings where different tasks exhibit moderate differences in their productive contributions to total output

The Impact of Gender Diversity on the Performance of Business Teams: Evidence from a Field Experiment

This paper reports on a field experiment conducted to estimate the impact of the share of women in business teams on their performance. Teams consisting of undergraduate students in business studies start up a venture as part of their curriculum. We manipulated the gender composition of teams and assigned students randomly to teams, conditional on their gender. We find that teams with an equal gender mix perform better than male-dominated teams in terms of sales and profits. We explore various mechanisms suggested in the literature to explain this positive effect of gender diversity on performance (including complementarities, learning, monitoring, and conflicts) but find no support for them

Nationalism and Its Explanations

This paper presents new terms for analyzing individuals’ national attitudes and their conceptualization and operationalization, a universal psychological structure in which these concepts interconnect, and a nationalism explanatory model. Three empirical studies using anonymous self-administered surveys served to test and improve national attitude assessment and its developmental theory. These empirical studies were conducted in a wellestablished state (the Netherlands), a recently established state (Slovakia), and a region in which a considerable proportion of citizens are striving to develop a new independent state (the Basque Autonomous Community of Spain)