The diversity of academic research teams and their performance

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to provide insight into the relationship between the diversity in academic research teams and their scientific performance, in order to study how the diversity of teams’ human capital promotes the creation of knowledge. To achieve that objective, an empirical study of a university’s research teams was carried out during the years 2006-2009. The results show that in general, human capital diversity (functional, gender, educational, institutional and status) increases research teams’ performance. Nevertheless, such relationship is not always lineal, adopting in some cases an inverted U-shaped, as in the case of diversity associated to the academics educational level and also to the participation of researchers from other universities.