National cultural diversity of research teams

Abstract

According to social categorization theory diversity has negative effects on group processes as it places a burden on communication and cohesion. From an information processing approach, however, diversity is considered as beneficial for groups broadening the available cognitive resources. The paper compares national cultural diversity of research teams, i.e. to what degree members of research teams come from different countries, across a set of 10 European countries and four academic domains (engineering, natural sciences, biology, and social sciences). It uses different measures of diversity which include species richness, evenness and disparity to different degrees. For all measures we find that the UK and Sweden have high cultural diversities of their research teams, whereas the Czech Republic, Hungary and Italy and at domain level the social sciences have low diversities. We then relate the diversity measures to the teams’ research performance measured as journal publications but at the current level of calculations we fail to find a stable relationship.