B0489
Title: Cultural diversity and team performance in the Italian Serie A
Authors: Francesco Addesa - Leeds Beckett University (United Kingdom) [presenting]
Abstract: Cultural diversity features prominently in management studies. A diverse range of skills and perspectives can produce innovation and a greater variety of solutions to day to day problems. At the same time, however, the same heterogeneous approaches and experiences can result in communication and coordination problems, lack of trust and intra/intergroup conflict. Two measures of diversity, indices of fractionalization and polarization, are computed on the basis of a newly constructed dataset on team composition and performance for 30 teams, 1,409 players and 2,279 matches in the Italian Serie A with information on the players place of origin, talent, position, demographics, manager experience and other factors. Only the fractionalization index is found to have a strong and persistent negative effect on game scores and player objective performance ratings. These results provide new important insights into the drawbacks of cultural heterogeneity in the workplace and calls for more in-depth analyses of the nexus diversity-performances on team performance.
