Ability Dispersion and Team Performance

Sander Hoogendoorn, Simon Parker () and Mirjam Praag
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Sander Hoogendoorn: CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, the Netherlands

No 14-053/VII, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute

Abstract: What is the effect of dispersed levels of cognitive ability of members of a (business) team on their team’s performance? This paper reports the results of a field experiment in which 573 students in 49 teams start up and manage real companies under identical circumstances. We ensured exogenous variation in — otherwise random — team composition by assigning students to teams based on their measured cognitive abilities (Raven test). Each team performs a variety of tasks, often involving complex decision making. The key result of the experiment is that the performance of business teams first increases and then decreases with ability dispersion. We seek to understand this finding by developing a model in which team members of different ability levels form sub-teams with other team members with similar ability levels to specialize in different productive tasks. Diversity spreads production over different tasks in order to escape diminishing marginal returns under specialization. The model comes with a boundary condition: our experimental finding is most likely to emerge in settings where different tasks exhibit moderate differences in their productive contributions to total output.

Keywords: Ability dispersion; team performance; field experiment; entrepreneurship (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D83 J24 L25 L26 M13 M54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-05-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cdm, nep-ent, nep-exp and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tin:wpaper:20140053

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