How Does the Gender Composition Affect Team Performance?

私人和公共机构通常由团队领导。这些团队的工作效率自然会影响这些组织的整体成功。鉴于妇女在领导职位上的代表性仍然严重不足，领导和控制机构的团队往往由男子主导。尽管过去进行了大量的研究，但仍不清楚这如何影响有关团队的表现。在此背景下，本研究提出三个研究问题，分析性别构成对团队绩效的影响。首先，我们将调查性别构成对团队绩效的整体影响。特别是，我们将研究性别多样性是否会增加能力和观点的多样性，从而导致更好的团队绩效。第二，我们将分析一个潜在的因果机制，通过它可以调解整体效果。具体而言，我们计划研究性别构成与团队内部沟通质量之间的联系。第三，通过估算团队内部沟通质量在整体效果中所占的比例，对沟通作为中介的作用进行量化。本研究项目将基于一项在线实验，该实验在一个新建立的在线平台上实施，使研究人员能够招募学生参加激励实验。由四名受试者组成的小组将在固定的时间内完成相同的任务。团队成员通过一个在线界面进行交互，该界面允许他们在一种聊天室中进行口头交流（就像标准的IP语音呼叫一样）。受试者将被随机分配到不同性别的团队中。关键的结果变量将是在团队层面上正确解决任务的数量。此外，我们将记录团队成员之间的口头沟通，并使用这些数据来构建沟通质量的衡量标准。利用实验数据，我们将首先得出性别组成对团队绩效的总体影响。其次，我们还将评估性别构成如何影响沟通质量。最后，使用中介分析，我们将确定的份额，是因果关系的整体效果，通过团队沟通的质量介导。

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.