Team Diversity and Incentives
研究任务相关团队多样性如何影响团队产出,发现多样性在三人以上团队中通过改变职业竞争激励成员努力,适度多样性比完全同质带来更高预期利润。
This paper analyzes how the degree of task-related team diversity influences the team outcome. The focus is on a novel benefit of team diversity that does not depend on complementary skills or mutual learning. We consider a multiagent setting where the employer makes use of career competition to motivate the team. Our analysis reveals incentive effects that do not exist in the well-studied case of teams of size 2. In teams with more than two members, diversity may have a positive effect on the efforts of some members although diversity leads to unbalanced career competition. As a consequence, expected profits are higher under a moderate degree of diversity compared with a situation with completely homogeneous agents. This result shows that the employer prefers a positive degree of diversity for pure incentive reasons. This paper was accepted by Suraj Srinivasan, accounting. Funding: This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [Grants EXC 2126/1–390838866 and EXC-2047/1–390685813].