Cultural Homophily and Collaboration in Superstar Teams

Gábor Békés () and Gianmarco Ottaviano
Additional contact information
Gábor Békés: Department of Economics, Central European University, 1100 Vienna, Austria; and HUN-REN Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, 1097 Budapest, Hungary; and Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), London EC1V 0DX, United Kingdom

Management Science, 2025, vol. 71, issue 10, 8149-8168

Abstract: One may reasonably think that cultural homophily, defined as the tendency to associate with others of similar culture, affects collaboration in multinational teams in general but not in superstar teams of professionals at the top of their industry. The analysis of an exhaustive data set on the passes made by professional European football players in the top five men’s leagues reveals that on the contrary, cultural homophily is persistent, pervasive, and consequential, even in superstar multinational teams of very-high-skill individuals with clear common objectives and aligned incentives who are involved in interactive tasks that are well defined and not particularly culture intensive.

Keywords: organizations; teams; culture; homophily; diversity; language; globalization; big data; panel data; sport (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.01799 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Cultural homophily and collaboration in superstar teams (2022)
Working Paper: Cultural Homophily and Collaboration in Superstar Teams (2022)
Working Paper: Cultural homophily and collaboration in superstar teams (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:71:y:2025:i:10:p:8149-8168

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Management Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().