infonet-economy

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.