Are multinational teams more successful?

Abstract

Teams have become increasingly multinational in many sectors. The impact of national diversity on team performance is, however, controversial. On the one hand, multinational teams may have access to a greater variety of task-relevant expertise, which should increase the team performance. On the other hand, national diversity may complicate team collaboration and increase team conflict. Applying panel econometrics to 4284 team observations in a globalized sector, we find evidence that multinational teams perform worse than teams with less national diversity.

Keywords:

• controlled field environment
• multinational teams
• national diversity
• professional sports
• team performance

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Agnes Bäker, Ed Lazear, an anonymous referee, and to the seminar participants at the University of Zürich for helpful comments. An earlier version of this paper was also presented at the 2009 Meeting of the Academy of Management in Chicago, USA.