
Bite-size question
Bite-size question
It depends on the make-up of the original teams. Encouraging team diversity in contexts where students tend to form very homogeneous teams can improve performance, but increasing it further in situations where teams are already moderately diverse can be detrimental.
Entrepreneurs show a pronounced tendency to create firms with people of a similar age, gender, ethnicity and education level, among other characteristics. Still, there are reasons to believe that a certain amount of diversity could boost team performance in entrepreneurial settings.
Heterogeneous teams are likely to enjoy a wider pool of skills and knowledge. This diversity might be useful when facing a challenge, as it may lead to a more diverse pool of solutions. The complementarity of team members can also be beneficial when assigning the variety of tasks to be accomplished to ensure venture success.
However, more diverse teams also demand more and better communication among team members to prevent misunderstandings, conflicts and trust problems. Thus, diversity could also be detrimental for entrepreneurial teams.
When talking about team diversity, there seems to be a trade-off between information gains and communication costs. Business challenges at the core of many entrepreneurial education courses represent interesting settings to study those trade-offs.
Entrepreneurship education students
Team performance
This summary is based on experimental evaluations of the following programmes and tweaks: