The Individual and Synergistic Impact of Team Diversity on Team Performance in the Context of European Soccer

Abstract

As a global industry, the field of professional sport mirrors the trend towards increasing levels of team diversity observed in the general workforce. Professional sports not only reflect workforce changes in various industries but also provide an advantageous context for conducting organizational research, including studies related to diversity issues. Therefore, using European soccer as a research context, this dissertation investigates the influences of two forms of team diversity, as well as their combined effects with other diversity features, on the final overall performance of individual teams. Additionally, in all three papers, multiple boundary conditions are identified through moderator exploration and construct refinement, enhancing the depth of the research. The first paper examines the effect of soccer players’ cultural diversity in terms of nationality on national teams’ performance. The estimation results from a dataset encompassing European national teams between 2004 and 2019 suggest cultural diversity positively contributes to on-field team performance and team members’ shared tenure can amplify this positive relationship. The second paper explores how different components of players’ salary dispersion affect team performance within the context of the English Premier League from the 2013/14 to 2019/20 season. Estimation results from different methods indicate differences regarding explained and unexplained pay dispersion in relation to individual team’s sporting success. Furthermore, depending on team composition, explained pay dispersion can exert a moderating effect on the relationship between pay level and team performance. The third paper adopts a team faultlines perspective and studies how the alignment of surface- (age, race, nationality) and deep-level diversity (pay dispersion) affects team sporting success. Through analyzing a dataset of the Italian Serie A spanning from the 2013/14 to 2019/20 season, the study uncovers a detrimental impact of team faultlines strength on team performance. However, the negative impact is mitigated by shared team tenure, and this mitigation is further amplified by leaders’ multicultural experience.