How Does the Gender Composition Affect Team Performance?

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Johannes Rincke
• Subject Area: Economic Policy, Applied Economics
• Term: from 2020 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 453632462

Private as well as public institutions are often led by teams. How effectively those teams perform naturally affects the overall success of these organisations. Given that women are still heavily underrepresented in leading positions, the teams leading and controlling institutions are often dominated by men. Despite considerable research efforts in the past, it is still unclear how this affects the performance of the teams in question. Against this backdrop, this research proposal aims at analyzing how the gender composition affects team performance.Three research questions will be analysed. First, we will investigate the overall effect of the gender composition on team performance. In particular, we will study if the common claim that gender diversity increases the diversity of abilities and perspectives and thereby leads to better team performance. Second, we will analyse one potential causal mechanism through which the overall effect might be mediated. Specifically, we plan to study the link between the gender composition and the quality of communication within teams. Third, we aim at quantifying the role of communication as a mediator by estimating the share of the overall effect that can be explained by the quality of communication within teams.The research project will be based on an online experiment implemented on a newly established online platform that enables the researchers to recruit students to participate in incentivized experiments. Teams of four subjects will work on identical sets of tasks for a fixed time span. Team members interact through an online interface that allows them to verbally communicate in a sort of chatroom (as in a standard Voice-over-IP call). Subjects will be randomly assigned into teams creating more and less gender-diverse teams. The key outcome variable will be the number of correctly solved tasks at team level. In addition, we will record the verbal communication among team members and use this data to construct measures of the quality of communication. Using the data from the experiment, we will first derive the overall effect of the gender composition on team performance. Second, we will also estimate how the gender composition affects the quality of communication. Finally, using a mediator analysis, we will identify the share of the overall effect that is causally mediated through the quality of team communication.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants