How diversity contributes to academic research teams performance

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to analyse how the job-related diversity in academic research teams influences their scientific performance. To achieve that objective, an empirical study of a university's research teams was carried out during the years 2006-2009. The results reflect a non-significant effect of functional diversity on research teams' performance, whereas status diversity affects in a positive and significant way. However, educational diversity has a significant negative impact when a certain threshold is exceeded. The effect of institutional diversity presents an inverted U-shaped relation with the number of published articles by the research teams. The results reveal that the relationship between diversity and research performance may not be a simple and direct one because its effect could depend on the organisational context and the type of diversity attributes.