Globalization, cultural heterogeneity and team performance - evidence from a global sport

This projects looks at how cultural diversity is affecting the behavior and performance of organizations and teams involved. Globalization may increase firms’ and people’s productivity due to a better match between specialized employees and specific tasks, but the productivity of ‘‘global firms’’, where employees originate from a variety of cultures and countries, may end up being crippled by internal communication and coordination problems. We use data from football (24 UEFA countries) owing to the availability of characteristics of team members (player performance), team performance (game results) and background of organizations (team features, history or wealth). An important further advantage of football is the ability to capture collaboration, an otherwise hard to come-by data. To this end, we are co-operating with OPTA, a London based data provider to study two seasons of the English Premier League with second-by-second information on all on the pitch activity. Having parsed this data and created a unique dataset on passing, we can measuring how diversity may be related to co-operation directly.