Leadership Teams, Cultural Representation, and Performance in Professional Soccer
Brian M. Mills et al.
Abstract
We estimate the effects of coach and player diversity, measured through cultural distance (CD) on team performance in professional soccer with a particular focus on teams of leaders (coaches). Our approach jointly tests the effects of player-to-player, coach-to-coach, and coach-to-player CD. Results reveal that increasing CD among players, even after controlling for human capital resources, has largely positive effects. There are positive benefits of increasing the diversity of coaching staffs; however, when staffs are too culturally distant, these positive effects attenuate. Most central to our inquiry, increased CD between coaches and players has a negative effect on performance. The combination of these results suggests that, as player diversity increases, coach diversity should also increase in ways to reduce CD across coaches and players. We propose that the negative effect of coach-to-player CD is due to more complex strategic planning and coordination tasks required of manager–employee interactions.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.