The influence of cultural context on the relationship between gender diversity and team performance: a meta-analysis

Abstract

The impact of gender diversity on team performance has become a central topic in the field of human resource management for researchers and practitioners alike. Extant research provides conflicting evidence on the relationship between gender diversity and team performance. To resolve these contradictory findings, we meta-analyze the relationship between gender diversity and two performance outcomes, namely task performance and contextual performance. Grounded in categorization-elaboration model, we simultaneously consider the positive and negative aspects of gender diversity. We further examine the effect of cultural context as a moderator on the relationship between gender diversity and team performance. Based on 71 independent samples from 68 studies published between 1996 and 2013, we find a significant negative relationship ( − 0.10) between gender diversity and contextual performance. Additionally, we find that the cultural dimensions gender egalitarianism and collectivism have significant moderating influences on the relationship between gender diversity and task performance.

Keywords::

• culture
• gender diversity
• GLOBE
• meta-analysis
• performance
• teams

Notes

^1. We do not hypothesize culture's moderating influence on the relationship between gender diversity and contextual performance because we did not find a sufficient number of empirical studies to conduct moderator analyses. We discuss this limitation in the discussion section and propose its examination as an avenue for future research.