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ABSTRACT
Research question
A growing strand of studies either analyzes the effects of age or gender diversity on team performance. We contribute to this literature by analyzing whether there is a gender-specific impact of age diversity on team performance. Based on the categorization-elaboration model, we first predict that age diversity in teams leads to better team performance. Second, we hypothesize that gender-mixed teams with age diversity perform significantly worse than single-sex teams with age diversity.
Research methods
Our research question is analyzed for biathlon relays of the seasons 2009/10–2016/17. We apply pooled OLS, Tobit and random effects regressions to explain the relay's shooting precision by the relay's age diversity and the gender composition including several controls.
Results and findings
The empirical analysis for male, female and gender-mixed professional biathlon relays supports our first hypothesis. Moreover, gender-mixed teams significantly outperform all-female teams.
Implications
Implications of this finding are that sport officials and coaches of professional athletes, should be aware of the positive effect of age diversity on team performance but consider that this link might depend on the gender composition of the respective team.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 There are also other studies investigating behavioral economic research questions in a biathlon setting, For instance, Harb-Wu and Krumer (Citation2019) who analyze choking under pressure in a biathlon setting. Moreover, Ahammer et al. (Citation2019) investigate the causal impact of confidence on shooting performance. Likewise, Gallicchio et al. (Citation2019) explain shooting accuracy (besides cardiac cycle) by physical exercise.
2 A comprehensive meta-analysis on the effects of group diversity on the performance of sport teams is provided by Lee and Cunningham (Citation2019).
3 We also estimated the following regressions without including this control to avoid multicollinearity with the athlete's previous performances. The estimation results remain robust and are available on request.
4 According to the finding of Grund and Westergaard-Nielsen (Citation2008), we also tested for a possible inverse u-shaped effect of age diversity on the relay's shooting precision. The results reveal a statistically significant linear instead of a non-linear effect. Therefore, the results are not presented in this study but can be provided upon request.