Universitt Zrich

Institut fr Betriebswirtschaftslehre
Lehrstuhl fr Unternehmensfhrung und politik
Prof. Dr. Egon Franck

Master Thesis
Are Heterogeneous Teams More Successful?
Evidence on Talent Disparity and National Diversity from Professional Cycling

Jrmy Reichenbach
Chemin des Barrires 17
CH-1920 Martigny
Tel: + 41 79 780 10 59
Email: jeremy.reichenbach@uzh.ch
Student Number: 08406043
Course of Studies: Management and Economics
Closing date: 05.05.2014

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of national diversity and talent disparity on teams
sporting success. Due to the high degree of internationalization and the peculiarities of
professional cycling, we expect culturally diverse teams and teams employing a workforce
with a broad range of skills to be more successful. Using panel data from the Tour de France
from 2001 to 2013, we test our hypotheses at the team-level. We find that conditioning on
average rider ability, skill dispersion is beneficial to team performance. However, the results
also suggest that national heterogeneity among team members does not have a significant
influence on the efficiency of cycling teams production. These findings have potentially
important implications on managerial practice.

Acknowledgements
This Master Thesis constituted a fascinating experience and enabled me to acquire a
comprehensive knowledge of the empirical procedure and an accurate view of professional cycling. My thanks go first and foremost to my supervisor, Marc Brechot, whose
encouragement, motivation, valuable inputs and guidance supported me during the entire of the project. The data collection has been made possible through the precious
cooperation with Mark Vanderwegen from the CQ Team, who has always responded
to my every request, and Prof. Dr. Daam Van Reeth who provided me with vital
information on professional cycling teams competing at the Tour de France. I am also
particularly grateful to Michelle Tang Morend for her helpful comments and to Ermira
Kukalaj for her unconditional support even in times of doubt. Finally, I dedicate this
Master Thesis to my brother, Sbastien Reichenbach. The promising start to his career
as a new professional rider of the Swiss team IAM Cycling continuously inspired me.

ii

Contents
1 Introduction

2 Theoretical Backgrounds
2.1 The Meaning of Diversity and Group Performance . . . . . . . . . . . .
2.2 Theoretical Frameworks of Diversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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3 Review of Literature
3.1 Diversity Typology . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3.2 National Diversity and Team Performance
3.3 Talent Disparity and Team Performance .
3.4 Theoretical Foundation . . . . . . . . . . .

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4 Hypotheses and Predictions

4.1 National Diversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4.2 Talent Disparity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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5 Empirical Framework
5.1 Data . . . . . . . . . . . .
5.2 Input Variables . . . . . .
5.2.1 National Diversity
5.2.2 Talent Disparity . .
5.3 Output Variables . . . . .
5.4 Control Variables . . . . .
5.5 Methodology . . . . . . .

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6 Results
6.1 Robustness Checking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6.2 Empirical Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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7 Concluding Discussion

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References

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A Tables and Figures

A.1 Distance Matrix - Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP)
A.2 Alternative Fixed Effects Regression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A.3 Independent Two-Sample t-tests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A.4 Distribution of Alternative Measures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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List of Tables
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Professional riders by country/region who participated in the Tour de France 2001-13

Descriptive Statistics: Tour de France Cycling Teams 2001-2013 (N = 265) . . . . . .
Fixed Effect Regressions For Cycling Team Performance (Tour de France 2001-13) . .
Alternative Regressions: Fixed Effects Regressions For Cycling Team Performance (Tour
de France 2001-13) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. 17
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List of Figures
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Distribution of Riders Productivity (on the Tour de France) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Distribution of Professional Riders Diversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Number Riders Finishing and Team Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Effects of National Diversity on Cycling Team Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Effects of Talent Disparity on Cycling Team Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Distance Matrix (Illustration of the Linguistic Distance Variable for Every Language
Pair Combination) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Descriptive Statistics, t-tests (CV Performance Index and Linguistic Distance) . . . .
Descriptive Statistics, t-tests (Number Finishing Riders) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Distribution of Riders Productivity (on Previous Seasons) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Distribution of Professional Riders Diversity (Seasonal Proxy of Talent) . . . . . . . .

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Introduction

Over the last few decades, sports industry has not only gained an economic dimension
but also become more worldwide integrated than ever. Individual sport stars and
professional sport teams today play a leading role in societies and their performance
have a wider appeal to people worldwide. This naturally raises the question of what
influence does the globalizing world have on team sports. Undoubtedly, the access to
a global market for athletes, offers greater opportunities than in the past. However,
this also brings its own share of challenges. Group diversity and its multiple effects on
team production have been a major topic of research in personnel and organizational
economics, progressively expending to sports economics.
Despite the plethora of economic studies, there is still a dearth of literature examining
the diversity using the sports business as a laboratory (Kahn, 2000). Only a few studies
have investigated the influence of national diversity on team performance and yielded
mixed results about the costs and benefits from building multinational teams (Haas
and Nesch, 2012; Kahane et al., 2013). Another strand of the literature has focused
on the effects of skill inequality on team and also leads to inconclusive findings (Franck
and Nesch, 2010; Papps et al., 2011). Lazear (1999b) presents a particular noteworthy
model which allows a clearer view on the costs and benefits of group diversity. His
comprehensive theoretical framework states that nation-specific skills may be beneficial
for team productivity, whereas high intrinsic diversity group may face difficulties to
collaborate due to communication problems.
This papers separately tests the effects on national diversity and talent disparity on
teams sporting success. Put in another way, our empirical analysis examines whether it
is optimal for sports directors to hire professional riders with a broad range of nationality
and ability, or whether team managers should select riders with homogeneous attributes
so as to prevent cultural conflicts and ensure team success. We address this question
by using a unique panel dataset for every riders performances in the Tour de France,
which for the purposes of this study, are aggregated to the team level for the period
1

of 2001-2013. The Tour de France, the third most popular mega sports events in the
world, provides extensive data about individual and team performance.
Similar to the study of Franck and Nesch (2010), we use an average individual
productivity, measured in terms of points gained prior to the current Tour de France,
as a proxy of the riders talent. We then compute a coefficient of variation at the
team level to estimate the skill distribution. We also construct a proxy of the national
heterogeneity based on the linguistic distance in any given team. The latter linguistic
index provides the main advantage to capture more cultural dimensions than the Blau
(1977) index, generally used to measure national diversity. Our key finding is that
cycling teams employing a workforce with a broad range of skills are more productive,
whereas teams composed of riders with different nationalities do not have a significant
effect on team productivity.
This paper proceeds as follows: Section 2 briefly discusses three theories on team
diversity and performance. Theoretical foundations on national diversity and talent
disparity are covered in Section 3. In Section 4, team production in professional cycling
is developed and it where we frame our hypotheses. Section 5 describes the dataset and
the methodology used in the empirical analysis. Section 6 details our empirical results.
The last section presents a summary and discusses the general economic implications.

Theoretical Backgrounds

Economists and social scientists began to show great interest in examining how diversity
may help or hinder organizations. Economists have investigated the influence of cultural
and differences in skills and abilities on the economic incomes, differentiating trade
or productivity (Alesina et al., 2013). The impact of diversity within a group has
also been a major research topic in social psychology (Steiner, 1972) and in personnel
economics (Kremer, 1993). However, the existing literature remains relatively hard to
interpret and difficult to synthesize because it addressed large within-unit difference

in demographic variables (Harrison and Klein, 2007). Moreover, despite the wealth of
studies, empirical evidences yield to conflicting results. Certain scholars emphasize the
beneficial effects of diversity for team performance, while others demonstrate strong
evidence that diversity can be destructive to group functioning (Williams and OReilly,
1998). According to Milliken and Martins (1996), the diversity within a group has to
be seen as a double-edge sword, increasing the possibility to develop creativity and
combining different knowledge as well as the likelihood to mismatch different values of
norms and systems (Williams and OReilly, 1998).
The goal of this section is to introduce the relation between team diversity and
team performance. We first define both concepts of team diversity and work group
context before discussing three theoretical frameworks that explain the influence of
heterogeneity on team success.

2.1

The Meaning of Diversity and Group Performance

In their comprehensive review, Williams and OReilly adopt a social psychological perspective on diversity and define diversity within a group as any attribute people use to
tell themselves that another person is different. The authors state that under specific
conditions and social construction certain attributes may be more salient whether or
not they are relevant to the task. If the latter attributes are task-relevant, in-group/outgroup distinctions might emerge and have significant impact on the group functioning
(Williams and OReilly, 1998). Jehn and Bezrukova (2004) also define diversity in
terms of visible differences and less visible personal characteristics such as the level of
education, tenure or even talent.
Visible attributes such as race, age or sex are more suitable for categorization than
less visible attributes such as tenure, education or experience within the organization.
However, salient characteristics may be low in job-relatedness, while less salient attributes are high (Williams and OReilly, 1998). It must be noted that a number of
studies have previously examined the demographic attributes mentioned above. This
3

is therefore of no surprise to find a plethora of studies on the latter demographic characteristics.

Williams and OReilly (1998) assume workgroup to be composed of individuals who
both see themselves and are seen by coworkers as an inter-dependent social entity
embedded in a larger organization. Their performance affect the others. Hackman
(1987) defines workgroup basing on three criteria: the productive output of the group
meets the demand of the customers; the use of social processes in performing work
that maintains capability of coworkers to work together and to achieve common tasks;
teams members have a positive group experience. In essence, special attention has not
only to be paid to the group productivity but also to less obvious inherent influences
on group members and on their ability to perform in the future (Gladstein, 1984).
In their paper, Jehn and Bezrukova (2004) emphasize the importance of particular
contextual variables to interpret the relationship between diversity and performance.
In the presence of workgroup, group cultures, business strategies and human resource
practices become especially important (Richard and Johnson, 2001). However, an important nuance has to be established: a detailed investigation about diversity in an
organizational context includes the expectation that the group will work together over
an extended period of time (Williams and OReilly, 1998).

2.2

Theoretical Frameworks of Diversity

According to Williams and OReilly (1998), three theories emerge as the most prevalent theoretical frameworks in highlighting the influence of diversity on team performance: social categorization, similarity/attraction and informational diversity and decision making.
Social categorization theory posits that changes in the demographic team composition have an effect on group process and the latter, in turn, affects group performance.
Assuming that individuals want to maintain a high level of self-respect, this behavior
frequently induces a process of social comparison with other team members. Through
4

the process of self-categorization, individuals categorize themselves into social classes

using salient attributes. The latter categorization process thus yields to establish a social identity. Previous studies have investigated the various effects that can be deduced
from the self-categorization. For instance, group members consider out-group members as less honest, trustworthy and cooperative than their own teammates (Tajfel and
Turner, 1979). Williams and OReilly (1998) point out the fact that primitive generic
social categories may accentuate the self-categorization and develop stereotyping, polarization and anxiety. These effects might affect group performance of heterogenous
teams in decreasing satisfaction, cohesiveness, communication and cooperation (Triandis et al., 1994).
The second theoretical foundation, the similarity/attraction theory, is based on the
attraction paradigm (Byrne, 1972) and refers to the idea that the similarity on visible
and less visible characteristics increases interpersonal attraction and liking. Rogers and
Bhowmik (1970) state that similarity reinforces positive beliefs and attitudes, while
dissimilarity appears to be a punishment. According to Burt and Reagans (1997),
individuals have a high inclination toward selecting people who are similar. Similarity/attraction theory predicts negative effects that are consistent with social categorization theory. A reduced satisfaction and communication, less positive attitudes and
a higher turnover arise as a negative result of dissimilarity and affects group processes
(Williams and OReilly, 1998).
Finally, the third theoretical framework is constructed on the idea that demographic
changes affect decision making and information (Gruenfeld et al., 1996)1 . According to
the Attraction Paradigm by Byrne (1972), one can imagine that individuals are more
inclined to establish contact with similar others and have a greater access to out-group
networks. Williams and OReilly (1998) conclude that the access to added information
1 Gruenfeld et al. predict that familiar teams, who have already achieved social acceptance, are less inclined to
comply than members from diverse teams. The authors assume that diverse groups are more likely to aggregate their
individual choices and adopt the majority preference than to pool their unique information and discover the correct
choice. In contrast, familiar groups are more likely to pool their knowledge under partial-information conditions, than
under full-information condition, where aggregation should effectively lead to the correct decision (Gruenfeld et al., 1996,
p.10-11).

might be beneficial for the group performance in terms of skills acquisition. Even though
it diminishes the group process success, at the same time.
Hence, diversity has to be considered as a double-edge sword and the sharing of
common knowledge within the group can encounter the attraction paradigm. The
three theoretical frameworks lead to conflicting predictions and so far the real impact
of diversity on group success is still unclear. Social categorization theory and similarity/attraction theory emphasize on the negative impacts of demographic variation,
while information/decision making theory highlights beneficial effects from more diverse
teams.

Review of Literature

Since this paper is situated between the growing literature measuring the effects of skill
inequality and national diversity on team outcome, we first define concepts of talent
disparity, national variety, language and culture. In the second part of this section,
we discuss the topics of national diversity and talent disparity. Finally, the theoretical
framework of Lazear where assessing the costs and benefits from diversity is covered.

3.1

Diversity Typology

As the present study investigates how the success of cycling teams is affected by riders heterogeneity, we need to clarify what is meant by various terms about diversity
like talent disparity and national or cultural diversity. In their paper, Harrison and
Klein (2007) present a clear typology of diversity. By addressing the problem of terminology, they provide a common basis to compare conceptualizations of within-unit
differences. For this reason, our research adopts the same reasoning as Harrison and
Klein (2007, 1200), who [. . . ] use diversity to describe the distribution of differences
among the members of a unit with respect to a common attribute, X, [. . . ]. According to Harrison and Klein (2007), we can distinguish further three distinct forms of

diversity: separation as a measure of diverging opinions and positions on a particular

topic within a group; variety as a measure of team members difference within a certain
category; and disparity as a proxy of the uniformity in the distribution of a teams
possession of a certain good. Critically for our paper, we assume that national diversity
is to link with the second form of diversity (variety), while talent disparity is to link
with the third form of diversity (disparity).
Following on from this, national diversity can be associated to a categorical variable and we, therefore, view that measuring national diversity and national variety is
the same (Brandes et al., 2009)2 . Dahlin et al. (2005) argue that national diversity
provides more information on social categories and can be defined as the number and
distribution of different national backgrounds among the workgroup members. Ayub
and Jehn (2006) assume that national diversity is particularly salient and has a greater
influence on team success than other forms of diversity. According to Dahlin et al.
(2005), the various effects of various nationalities are better explained by the social categorization theory (Williams and OReilly, 1998; Earley and Mosakowski, 2000). This
theory states that national diversity may increase the self-categorization process and
develop stereotyping, polarization and anxiety. From an organizational point of view,
globalization has led to major changes in the work environment (Earley and Gibson,
2002) and forced multinational firms to use different information sharing, communication styles and patterns (Gibson and Gibbs, 2006). Thus, international firms need to
adapt their organizational structures since the range of further cultural challenges, due
to the recent globalization, has increased.
In examining the different dimensions of diversity, we observe that diversity may
also enter the production function. One form of diversity, often identified as less salient
than culture, nationality, race or gender but certainly more task-relevant, is the talent
disparity. In our opinion, talent disparity encompasses a broad range of knowledge,
skills, abilities and plays a central role in group functioning. According to Harrison
2 Brand et al. (2009) define this categorical attribute (i.e. the variety) as the highest level of diversity that can be
achieved if each team member presents different attribute within a certain category.

and Klein (2007), talent disparity represents a good proxy of the uniformity in the
distribution of skills and abilities within a same team.
In order to conclude this section, we still need to define culture and language, since
both play a vital role in communication between team members. Lazear (1999a) states
that culture integrates notions of shared values, beliefs, expectations, customs, jargon
and rituals, language is also usually associated with a set of common sounds and symbols
by which individuals communicate. Lazear also argues that societies or international
teams may include a number of cultures and languages. In our view, national diversity is
identical to cultural diversity, because it captures both cultural and linguistic attributes.

3.2

National Diversity and Team Performance

Researchers in the past had paid very little attention to national diversity in comparison to racial diversity (Haas and Nesch, 2012). Despite the few studies on subject
and past conflicting results, scholars emphasize on the importance of considering team
processes and the organizational context surrounding the team. According to Brandes
et al. (2009), team and group processes operate as intermediaries and interfere with the
effect of a teams degree of diversity and performance. The authors state that contextual factors such as firms strategy and corporate culture attenuate the latter relation.
Kochan et al. (2003) note that an organizational context encouraging national diversity
may provide fertile ground for team success. At the opposite, a management system
neglecting the diversity on team could imperil the teams outcome. The distinct role
played by contextual factors is further supported by Gebert (2004), by placing a greater
emphasis on the use of a diversity management system to increase team performance.
Even though the theoretical background appears to be quite clear, from a meta-analysis
point of view, empirical evidence for multinational teams remains extremely mitigated
and leads to no conclusive findings. Therefore, pro and contra arguments have to be
clarified.
A certain confusion concerning the real impact of national diversity on group team
8

performance reigns in the existing literature. The optimistic view, based on the information and decision theory, argues that diversity may be beneficial for team process
and team performance. Gruenfeld et al. (1996) conclude that homogeneous groups are
less likely to possess differing points of view and share unique knowledge, while diverse
groups are likely to bring different knowledge and new perspectives. In line with the
decision theory, Williams and OReilly (1998) note that international teams represent a
variety of task-relevant attributes and have access to a higher degree of information and
expertise. In other worlds, national diversity represents a form of structural diversity
that can be beneficial in task accomplishment (Ayub and Jehn, 2006). With respect
to the first condition of the best practice 3 , multinational teams directly benefit from
the variety of cultural skills and abilities (Lazear, 1999b). Dahlin et al. (2005) provide
evidence for unanticipated information-processing benefits that neutralize the potential
losses associated with social categorization processes. Evidence also suggests positive
effects from language-based diversity on productivity (Alesina and Ferrara, 2004) and
from multicultural urban environment (Ottaviano and Peri, 2006) on productivity.
From the pessimistic view, the national diversity is detrimental to team processes
and team productivity. The negative effects of national diversity are described under
the social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner, 1979) and the similarity/attraction theory
(Byrne, 1972). According to the social identity theory, individuals categorize themselves
into social classes using salient attributes such as cultural backgrounds. It is likely that
the variety of cultural values existing within a group lead to social categorization processes, in which individual from different nations make in-group/out-group distinction
(Gibson and Gibbs, 2006). Because cultural values reflect a social groups shared ways
of understanding and behaving (Whitener et al., 1998), stereotyping, polarization and
anxiety may result from this social categorization processes. As a consequence, the
emergence of several sub-groups may potentially feed conflicts and can be extremely
prejudicial to group successes. Ayub and Jehn (2006) find that the degree of nation3 See

(Lazear, 1999b)s framework developed in the subsection 3.4.

alism (e.g. in-group favoritism and out-group rejection) appears to be a crucial factor
in preventing the outbreak of relationship and process conflicts due to national heterogeneity.
The similarity/attraction theory, whereby individuals are attracted to others who
are similar, rather than dissimilar, also supports the negative view on national diversity (Byrne, 1972). This theory suggests that similarity among teams members reinforces positive beliefs and attitudes, while dissimilarity is perceived as a punishment.
Moreover, mutual attraction increases communication, cooperation and integration processes. As a result, international teams experience integration problems and decrease in
effectiveness. Gibson and Gibbs (2006) find that virtual teams composed by an international workforce will underperform. In his empirical study on NHL players, Kahane
et al. (2013) predict that integration costs associated with language and cultural differences may override any gains from diversity. Analyzing height seasons of German
professional soccer, Haas and Nesch (2012) also find a negative relationship between
nationality diversity and soccer teams sporting success.
To conclude this sub-section, previous studies have suggested that the impacts of
national diversity on team performance remain extremely hard to interpret. There are
several possible explanations for these mixed results: first, the organizational context
and contextual factors surrounding the group plays an important role and may attenuate the effects of national diversity on team outcome. Second, the magnitude of
diversity on team success depends on the nature of the underlying task. In this regard,
Prat (2002) finds that in the presence of multiplicative production function, the set of
optimal solutions encompasses agents of the same type. At the contrary, when agents
are substitutes in the payoff function, heterogeneous teams should have a competitive
advantage. Third, divergent conclusions are derived from the three theoretical frameworks that explained national diversity. Accordingly, the three previous clarifications
illustrate the necessity to consider organizational, contextual and cultural factors, as a
whole.

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3.3

Talent Disparity and Team Performance

An important strand of literature focuses on the effects of talent disparity on team

productivity. Since differences in skills and abilities may contribute to collective performance, talent heterogeneity has been a major topic in research in the field of labor and
personnel economics (Earley and Mosakowski, 2000; Prat, 2002; Kremer, 1993; Brandes
et al., 2009). We hence examine the powerful force of talent disparity on production
function across a variety of contexts.
We first analyze the context of problems solving. In consonance with the idea of
Watson et al. (1993)4 , Hong and Page (1998, 2001)5 come up with two important
findings. First, diverse groups can find optimal solutions to difficult problems; second,
in a particular context, diverse groups with limited abilities are likely to outperform
homogeneous groups composed with high-skilled workers. The intuition behind this is
that heterogeneous agents not only possess raw intelligence, but above all bring new
perspectives and heuristics to a problem.
If benefits from talent disparity in problems solving have wide acceptance among
the existing literature, Prat (2002) evokes a helpful nuance in the context of team
theory. He advocates that the type of interaction between agents moderates the effect of
talent heterogeneity and distinguishes between conjunctive and disjunctive tasks. In the
presence of complementary activities, a homogeneous workforce maximizes coordination
and insures high productivity6 . On the other hand, the presence of disjunctive tasks
in the production function leads to building more diverse teams (e.g. in a particular
context of problem solving).
Hamilton et al. (2003) offer additional insights into how talent diversity among workforce is likely to affect team productivity. They find that heterogeneity may be beneficial
4 Watson et al. (1993) argue that heterogeneous groups generally achieve better group performance on complex
problem-solving tasks than homogeneous groups but need time to perform effectively due to coordination costs.
5 Hong and Page (1998) define talent diversity as differences in problem solvers perspectives and heuristics (e.g. the
variation in how people encode and search for solutions to problems).
6 Brandes et al. (2009) explain that if complementary tasks have to be successfully completed for the product to have
full value, every agents have to perform at or above a certain level of proficiency to assure high team productivity. The
whole team performance may be endangered if a single team member (e.g. the weakest link) doesnt perform at the
threshold performance.

11

in terms of mutual learning and social team norms. Mutual learning refers to a transfer of knowledge among workers. Thus, teams with high talent diversity will achieve
better performance, since the presence of high-skilled individuals increases productivity
of low-skilled individuals. In the same way, work norms could result from the positive
relationship between team diversity and team performance. Indeed, Hamilton et al.
(2003) predict the formation of peer pressures from an intra-team bargaining process,
in which agents negotiate over the common effort level. This implies that high-abilities
workers have better outside option and contribute to the social norms and team output
in a larger extent. In line with Hamilton et al. (2003), Hamilton et al. (2004) find that
more heterogeneous teams, where there is opportunity for mutual learning, are more
productive while holding a constant average ability.
By using panel data from German professional soccer, Franck and Nesch (2010) establishes a negative correlation between talent disparity and the likelihood of winning
a game, whereas talent disparity improves the teams final standing in the championship. These findings are consistent with the predictions of Prat (2002) and Hamilton
et al. (2003, 2004). The moderating influence of professional soccer, considered as a
conjunctive task where fielded players and reserve players are substitutes, moderates
the relationship between talent disparity and team productivity. Moreover, the paper
sheds light on the varying importance of mutual learning during the preparation and
competition stage.

3.4

Theoretical Foundation

Lazear provides a formal framework to clarify how differences in skills may increase
overall performance. Critical for our paper, he identifies a trade-off between the productive benefits of diversity and the costs due to communication problems.
Following the idea that globalization leads to global firms7 , Lazear (1999b) argues
that international firms that strive to mingle workers from different cultural and lan7 Defined

as one whose employees originate from a variety of cultures or countries, see Lazear (1999a).

12

guage backgrounds may incur additional costs. In order to cover these additional costs,
benefits from culture-inherent skills have to overcome communication problems and
differences in general perceptions among team members (Williams and OReilly, 1998).
As a result, multinational firms may face a trade-off concerning the optimal degree of a
teams national diversity. In his real-world example, Lazear (1999b) derives three conditions involving the quest for the best practices under which international companies
can generate productivity gains. The first condition is based on the statistical proposition that individuals from other cultures may have different knowledge of domestic
workers. He assumes that: culture-inherent capabilities provide different distributions
of skills and knowledge and that the correlation in the skills of two individuals drawn
from the same country is likely to be larger than the correlation between two individuals drawn from different countries Lazear (1999b, C22)8 . In other words, teammates
must have different skills, abilities, or information. In this way, the team may benefit from the complementarities among its members. The two additional factors that
improve teamwork are relevant skills in team production and ability of team members
to communicate. To illustrate both notions, Lazear considers the complementary case
of disjoint skills (when Bs skills are disjoint from the As)9 . Workforce disjointness
avoids perfect substitute situation and increases the value of having an international
team. The use of complementary skills involves communication between co-workers. We
therefore assume that some members of As and Bs are bilingual. However, the increase
in communication may generate additional costs and affect the benefits of employing a
workforce with a broader range of ability.
Lazear (1999a)s second model provides empirical evidence in understanding how
national diversity may affect the firms labor market decisions. Based on the idea that
common culture and common language facilitate trade between individuals, Lazear
8 To

illustrate the first condition of the best practice, see Lazear (1999b, C22).
assume workers to be of types A and B. The production function is Output = f (x1 , x2 ) where x1 and x2 are
skills. Suppose that As are identical and each has one unit of x1 . Bs are also identical and each Bs has one unit of
skill xi , i = 1 or 2 but not both. Thus, either all Bs have skill 1 or they all have skill 2. Both types speak different
languages (language includes jargon, rules or other aspects of the business culture that are shared by all As and by all
Bs but are different between the groups A and B) and in order for As and Bs to work together, they have to be able to
communicate (Lazear, 1999b, C19).
9 We

13

derives critical assumptions to the present paper: first, individual from minority groups
tends to be more inclined to assimilate the culture and learn the language of the majority
groups; second, it is less likely that individuals from the majority group learn languages
of minorities rather than the opposite.
In definitive, Lazear (1999b)s first model points out the importance of considering
two aspects of diversity when analyzing multinational teams: (1) diversity in skills,
ability, and information sets of teammates; and (2) diversity in other factors that may
enhance or reduce within-team communication. Lazears arguments suggest that productive teams should be diverse along skills and abilities, but homogeneous in other
demographic dimensions that may increase costs of cross-cultural dealing.
In spite of the empirical evidence on the diverse assimilation effects presented in
the second model, Lazear states that the theoretical model can not be supported by
considerable empirical evidence: At the empirical level, it is difficult, if not impossible,
to obtain direct measures of who works with whom. Even if this could be done, it would
then be necessary to obtain information on the characteristics, skills, and knowledge
of the individuals who are engaged in team production Lazear (1999b, 35C). We
generally agree with this generalization, we believe, however, that certain segments of
the professional sports industry such as professional cycling deserve a special attention
in empirical investigations (Kahane et al., 2013).
According to Lazear (1999b)s framework, professional cycling teams are akin to
global firms. They are largely composed by workers (riders) from a variety of countries,
all of whom are integrated into a single work group (the cycling team) and additional
costs may result from national heterogeneity. Furthermore, team production in professional cycling differs from other team sports because it relies on a strong hierarchical
organization. The victory of a team leader clearly depends on his teammates performance and abilities. As a result, the teams output is based on continuous interactions
between riders. Following on from this, the diversity of culture-inherent skills may play
a crucial role in the teams sporting success. Thus far, we believe that the peculiarities

14

in professional cycling allow testing to be made on the effects of talent diversity and
national diversity on cycling team productivity.
There is a small literature on diversity in team sports. Namely, the number of
empirical studies on the effects of national heterogeneity and skill dispersion on team
performance and its influence on the organizational literature are limited. According
to Hansen et al. (2006), empirical researches suffers from the absence of group-level or
work-unit-level data. Nonetheless, data from professional cycling may overcome these
limitations. They are clearly observable and new technologies provide a huge amount
of datasets about teams, individual performances and stage characteristics. In addition
to the reliable and available data, a cycling event such as the Tour de France is unique
and similar to a field experiment for the reason that it takes place in a controlled
environment (Torgler, 2007)10 .
Although cycling is a very popular sport in Europe and was one of the first commercial sports to be practiced professionally, research on professional road cycling remains
scarce. Small body of literature focuses on teamwork and determinants of success at a
specific race (Torgler, 2007; Prinz and Wicker, 2012), efficiency issues in reforms (Rebeggiani and Tondani, 2008), the efficiency of Tour de France cycling teams (Rogge
et al., 2013) or type and role of rankings (Cherchye and Vermeulen, 2006). In line
with the theoretical arguments by Lazear (1999b) and the existing theory, the present
paper analyses the influence of group heterogeneity on the teams sporting success.
What is missing so far, is an interdisciplinary study that scrutinizes the varying effects
of national diversity and talent disparity on cycling teams productivity, in context of
team-sports industry. We, thereupon, try to fill this gap using data from professional
road cycling collected from the Tour de France.
10 Due to the controlled environment, we assume that all riders perform in the same terrain, at the same time with
the same constraint, such as weather conditions. Furthermore, Torgler (2007) notes that external influences can be
controlled by the laws of the event, as they are the same for all athletes competing on the race.

15

Hypotheses and Predictions

Globalization is not solely an economic phenomenon, it is all encompassing. The sport

industry and professional cycling are no exception to the rule. The Tour de France,
the third most popular sporting event in the world, rapidly expanded from its original
French field to acquire an international dimension11 . The increase internationalization
in professional cycling teams basically began in the late 1980s, when the number of
international riders of different nationalities was rising steadily. Existing cycling teams
are similar to multinational teams which include a larger number of foreign riders with
a wide variety of nationalities. The British team Sky Procycling is a perfect example
of a global firm described by Lazear (1999b). In 2013, no fewer than 10 different
nationalities rub shoulders within the team.
Table 1 illustrates the noticeable increase of riders from Great Britain, Eastern and
Central Europe. Nevertheless, the early dominance of traditional road cycling countries,
such as France, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Netherlands, remains quite stable over time.
This diversity across countries begs the question of what are the effects of national
diversity and culture-inherent skill dispersion on team output in the context of cycling
team production.
Team production in professional cycling is distinct from other sports in several aspects. First, professional cycling is neither a pure individual sport, nor a classical team
sport. The fundamental difference to other team sports is that the winner of a cycling
event is the single racer and not the entire team (Brewer, 2002). Therefore, professional
cycling can be considered as an extreme case of individual team sport, where the winner takes it all. Second, professional cycling requires most of its riders to abandon
personal ambition for a tiny handful of team leaders. This hierarchical organization is
particularly true in multi-stage race, where cyclists form cooperative teams, composed
of a number of servants called domestics, committed to serving their sovereign, the
11 During the first Edition of the Tour de France, in 1903, the vast majority of the 60 professional or semi professional
cyclists were domestic riders, while foreign riders only represented 7% of all participants. Since 1913, the rate of foreign
riders and the variety of nationalities have continuously increased. In 2013, foreign riders represented no more than 80%
of contenders and 34 different nationalities were participating in the 100th Edition of the Tour de France.

16

Table 1: Professional riders by country/region who participated in the Tour de France 2001-13
2001
Austr./Switz.
Oceania
Benelux
CEE/FSU
Others
Scandinavia
France
Germany
Italy
Spain
US
UK

4
3
27
14
5
7
50
9
24
37
8
1

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

6
4
23
21
6
4
42
6
29
38
9
1

9
7
15
12
7
5
41
17
35
43
6
1

11
10
17
14
4
8
41
15
30
31
7
0

11
10
21
15
6
8
32
16
27
34
9
0

7
6
19
11
7
6
38
14
24
34
7
2

7
8
19
12
6
5
33
17
16
37
6
4

4
11
25
12
7
5
39
14
19
25
4
3

5
9
25
17
7
7
41
14
15
27
7
4

8
12
23
24
7
8
35
15
17
30
8
8

5
7
29
30
6
7
45
12
15
25
10
5

4
13
33
24
8
8
44
13
15
21
8
5

3
13
31
22
10
7
42
10
18
27
6
6

Notes: adapted from the website cqranking.com. Oceania region includes riders from New Zealand and Australia, while
CEE/FSU region includes countries from former Soviet Union such as Russia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Ukraine,
Moldavia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Belarus.

team leader. Domestics can be defined as sportsmen who spend their whole careers not
pursuing their own interest but helping their captains instead (Rebeggiani and Tondani,
2008). Entirely dependent on such loyal riders, who perceive helping behaviour as a
natural task, cycling teams need them to work together to achieve good performance.
Rebeggiani and Tondani state that without teammates, coordinating efficiently among
themselves, team leaders can hardly win major cycling events. As teams need to work
together and to protect their favourites, team production relies on a clear division of
labour. In doing so, a good team dynamic is guaranteed when domestics achieve tactical imperatives like chasing breakaways, starting sprints or delivering food. Apart from
specific race assignments, the raison dtre of these cyclists is to shield and protect their
captain. Team leaders shelter behind their domestics, who overcome the air resistance,
riding as sparingly as possible until the critical moments. Hence, the question that
is: how could teammates, irrespective of their individual abilities, work as a team and
build success together?
However, cooperation in professional cycling is a delicate balance, since the tension
between individual and collective goals is clearly present (Netland et al., 2012). This
social dilemma affects long-term team cooperation and, in turn, team productivity.
Moreover, this tension is exacerbated either by the presence of conflicting personalities
17

or when teammates refrain from contributing to the good of the team. The best sports
directors are attentive to the distribution of individual abilities and attempt to build
the best group of riders possible. Rather than simply hiring the star riders that money
can buy, their primary concern is to ensure team chemistry (Bryson et al., 2011).
The Wiggins-Froome rivalry to become Sky Procycling No 1 illustrates how tensions
within a team can imperil cooperation on team and subsequently the teams sporting
performance.
Nonetheless, cooperation challenges can be handled by developing a good sense of
cohesion. Netland et al. (2012) state that cohesion is crucial to achieve coordination
on cycling teams. Indeed, a good team spirit keeps team members fully motivated and
willing to sacrifice for the team. Furthermore, group cohesion ensures a good relationship between teammates. When team members know each other well, it is easier for
everyone to work toward the same goal and to make additional efforts. Finally, cohesive groups are better prepared in resolving any problems with conflicting personalities
or nationalities. Team-building activities reinforce cohesion spirit, which appears to
be essential in laying the foundation of a collective orientation and make cooperation
feasible in cycling teams.

4.1

National Diversity

In the context of Tour de France, professional cycling teams participating address the
challenge of national diversity. As the three-week race is divided into 20 to 21 stages
with different characteristics that require specific riders skills, cycling teams with the
best collection of talents are likely to win the race (Prinz, 2005). Looking for specific
skills and abilities, a cycling team recruits professional riders from a global market
to broaden the collective sets of skills and abilities beyond what could be found if it
employed solely domestic cyclists (Kahane et al., 2013). According to the reasoning
by (Lazear, 1999b), international riders are similar to rare resources because of their
cultural inherent-abilities that are somewhat disjoint from domestic riders.
18

It is one thing to possess the best collection of talents, but it is another to make good
use of it. While examining the race situation, a constellation of domestics share the load
until the mountains, another cluster negotiates at the foothills and a final pair will escort
the leader during the mountain stages (Rendell, 2012). The Katusha Team at the Tour
de France 2013 paints a good picture of an efficient use of non-overlapping skills sets.
As foreign riders have skills that are disjoint from Russian cyclists, there is undeniably
a potential gain from employing a national diversity workforce (three Russian, three
Spanish, one Norwegian, one Belorussian and one Latvian) during the Tour. Following
on from this, we predict that culture-inherent skills may determine domestics tasks.
It is no secret that Spanish riders, who are lighter cyclists, are considered among the
best climbers of the peloton (Prinz and Wicker, 2012), while Norwegian, Belorussian
and Latvian cyclists have unique capabilities for specific duties or weather conditions12 .
As mountain stages are decisive to the Tour de France general classification, and the
Katusha Team competed for the end victory, it was thus more than likely that the two
Spanish domestics shepherded their captain up the epic ascents. We can also imagine
that the Norwegian and the Latvian domestics, more massive cyclists, exploited their
comparative advantage on flat stages and served as a wind shield for their leader. In
line with the theoretical argument by Lazear (1999b) and the empirical findings from
Brandes et al. (2009), the previous example clearly supports the perspective of nationspecific skills.
On such account, national diversity can be seen as a result of resource research in
specific talents. We argue that the organizational structure of cycling teams based on a
clear division of labour may overcome additional costs from national diversity (Lazear,
1999b). In addition, strategy and tactics are discussed by sports director, team leader
and domestics before each stage aiming at avoiding both communication and misunderstanding problems (Netland et al., 2012). Finally, group cohesion definitely plays a
12 Since the golden era of Miguel Indurain in the early to mid-1990s, Spain has emerged as a major force in the peloton.
Spanish superstars such as Alberto Contador (Team Saxo-Tinkoff ), Samuel Snchez (Euskaltel - Euskadi), Oscar Freire
(retired) or Joaquim Rodriguez (Katusha Team) demonstrate that lighter cyclists, who have facilities for mountain
stages, were pretenders to final victory. It is thus not surprising to find three Spanish athletes within the Russian squad.

19

vital role in neutralizing the negative effects of national heterogeneity. The key point
here is that domestics are carefully selected in order to ensure cooperation during the
whole race. In the presence of united and cohesive teams, conflicts due to different cultural value systems (Williams and OReilly, 1998) are less likely to blow up and imperil
team productivity. The hierarchical structure of cycling teams should also moderate
the detrimental effect of national diversity, countering the social-categorization theory
(Tajfel and Turner, 1979) and the similarity/attraction theory (Byrne, 1972). To continue with the Katusha Team example, the team leader Joaquim Rodriguez had on tap
a pool of highly skilled domestics, with whom he had excellent relationships. Thanks
to the well-functioning cooperation of the whole team and the huge work accomplished
by his teammates, the captain of the Russian team took the final podium at the Tour
de France 2013, in the third position. Hence, we conjecture that:
Hypothesis 1: National diversity is beneficial to the success of a cycling team.

4.2

Talent Disparity

As the variety of nation-specific capabilities is an essential ingredient to the alchemy of

a successful cycling team (Lazear, 1999b), there is evidence that talent disparity plays a
major role in a particular context of team production in professional cycling. It should
be noted that since the end of the 1960s, professional road cycling has become more
hierarchically organized and team tactics are more important than ever before.
The protected favourites who benefit from their domestics attentions are athletes
of proven abilities - an aristocracy of talent, not inherited privilege (Rendell, 2012)13 .
These world-class cyclists, who have gained recognition from the others as legitimate
captains, play a leading role in the team and are expected to contend for the overall
general classification. This aristocracy of talent influences the team composition and
naturally leads to performance inequalities. Broadly speaking, the pure ability differ13 Thomas Jefferson, former President of the United States, was convinced that the best interests of a democratic
society could be served only if a natural aristocracy of talent and virtue were to dominate. See Lammers (1970) and its
paper on "Jefferson and His Aristocracy of Talent Proposal."

20

ences between the leader and his domestics are reflected on the team hierarchy. The
rider at the top of the ability distribution becomes an undisputed team leader and the
remaining his helpers.
It is worth noting that professional cycling teams are made up of riders with particular specialist skills. Besides the team leader, who are either excellent climbers (such as
Andy Schleck, Team RadioShack-Leopard ) or excellent time-trialists (such as Bradley
Wiggins, Team Sky Procycling), stage race cycling team comprises helpers of complementary abilities, such as sprinters who are proficient in explosive accelerations in bunch
sprints, all-rounders (rouleurs) who can ride all day over rolling parcours contributing
to chasing down breakaways, climbers (grimpeurs) who excel at mountain stages but
with less time-trialling ability to sustain a general classification challenge, punchers
who are very good at explosive attacks on shorter hills and domestics - usually a junior
rider with limited abilities - who adopts a subordinate role. This specialization corresponds to the theoretical argument by Lazear (1999b) stating that the disjointness of
workforces increases the value of employing a multinational team. Even though helpers
are endowed with specific and complementary skill sets, they are above all embedded
in a team production process. In this context, the hierarchical nature of cycling teams
is of paramount importance and coerces every teammate to serve their team leader.
In consonance with the paper of Prat (2002) concerning the type of interaction
between agents, it must be noted that team production in professional cycling relies
on continuous interaction between riders. In the extreme case of conjunctive tasks,
Prat predicts that skill dispersion decreases team productivity. We should, however,
acknowledge one key point concerning the matter of principle: the particular nature
of cycling team and their organizational structure, which relies on a strong hierarchy,
must be taken into account. The latter hierarchy is based on talent heterogeneity
among riders in a team and eventually contributes to performance inequalities. On the
other hand, the question arises as to at what point could a too large spread in skills
be damaging to team success and to teammate cooperation? Therefore, we must also

21

consider the case where a rider performing less than the average ability (the weakest
link) could dramatically imperil the teams sporting success.
In line with Hamilton et al. (2003, 2004), some direct benefits can be derived from
skill dispersion on cycling teams. First, talent heterogeneity leads to higher team norms
of productivity, which promotes mutual learning between the less and more talented
riders. Hence, during the preparatory stage, talent heterogeneity may facilitate mutual
learning process and imposes social pressure on low performers to catch up in training
(Franck and Nesch, 2010). Second, since a clear hierarchy is established between
riders, talent heterogeneity, through the dominance of a single star rider, may solidify
the delicate balance of cooperation and reduce the emergence of conflicting personalities
(Netland et al., 2012). In contrary, teams employing riders endowed with equal talent
are more likely to be torn apart by internal rivalries. The fact is that employing
equally good riders will reduce individuals determination to make sacrifice for the
team and teams success14 . Prinz and Wicker (2012) offer additional insights. They
find that composing a team of stars is counterproductive, since individuals are refrain
from riding for the good of the team. This sheds light on the importance of team
composition. Therefore, we predict that teams having a workforce with a very similar
range of ability will underperform:
Hypothesis 2: Talent disparity is beneficial to the success of a cycling team, holding
the average ability level constant.

Empirical Framework

The main objective of this empirical research consists of the analysis of the potential
effect in diversity on teams sporting success. This section provides detailed explanations on collected data, encountered difficulties, applied methodology, and the different
variables entered in our empirical model.
14 At the 1959 Tour de France, the national French team was made up of many strong riders such as Raphal Gminiani,
Roger Rivire Henri Anglade and Jacques Anquetil. Despite a mutual aid pact between Rivire and Anquetil, the internal
rivalries within the French team fostered the victory of the Spanish Federico Bahamontes.

22

5.1

Data

This paper tests the effects of national diversity and talent disparity on team performance using professional cycling as a labor market laboratory. The dataset was drawn
from the official road cyclists homepage www.cqranking.com and from the internet portal www.cyclingfever.com. Relevant riders characteristics and individual performance
statistics have been collected from both sources. Our extensive sample comprises of
2,462 professional road riders, grouped into 44 different cycling teams, who have participated in the Tour de France between 2001 and 2013. Teams are mostly UCI ProTeams
with the exception of teams that organizers invite every year. Most of the UCI ProTeams participated more than once, such as the Team Rabobank or La Franaise des
Jeux which have entered every Tour de France since 2001.
According to the website cqranking.com, we eliminated professional riders who failed
the doping tests15 . As the results of a cycling team may be confounded by the removal
of team leaders involved in doping scandals, we logically eliminated the results of the
whole team. The Armstrong doping case remains a notable exception in the history
of the fight against doping in sport. In line with the general classification published
on the homepage cqranking.com, we maintained the results of Lance Armstrong and
his different teams. In total, 6 riders and 7 teams were removed from the extensive
database.
We agree with Torgler (2007) that professional road cycling comprises two major
advantages to test empirical hypotheses, in particular, in comparison to non-market
economic topics. First, accurate and reliable performance statistics of individual riders
and cycling teams are available. Second, the Tour de France is similar to a field exper15 Floyd Landis (Phonak Hearing Systems) tested positive for the use of testosterone after the 17th stage of the Tour
de France 2006; Iban Mayo Diez (Euskaltel-Euskadi) tested positive for EPO in the Tour de France 2007; Bernhard Kohl
(Gerolsteiner ), who finished third in the Tour de France of 2008, tested positive in the specific Cera-tests that were
carried out two months after the Tour finished; Dmitriy Fofonov (Crdit Agricole) tested positive for heptaminol in the
18th stage of the Tour de France 2008; Stefan Schumacher (Gerolsteiner ), winner of 2 time trials in the Tour de France
of 2008, tested positive in the specific EPO-Cera-tests that were carried out two months after the Tour finished; Mikel
Astarloza Chaurreau (Euskaltel-Euskadi) tested positive for the use of EPO after an Out of Competition Control, at 26
June 2009; Alberto Contador (Astana, 2010; Saxo Bank - Sungard, 2011 ) tested positive for the use of Clenbuterol in
the Tour de France on 21 July 2010. For more details see the list of deleted riders from CQ results (for doping violations)
on www.cqranking.com.

23

iment, since the race takes places in a controlled environment. All professional cyclists
compete under the same conditions with the same outside restrictions. Furthermore,
external influences and team performance are controlled by the rules of the event. As
a result, Torgler assumes that many factors can then be held constant because the race
takes place in a controlled environment. To test the two hypotheses described above,
we aggregated our individual data at the team-level information. The resulting sample
size consists of a total number of 265 observations (n = 265) covering the 2001-2013
period.

5.2
5.2.1

Input Variables
National Diversity

Our contention is that rider characteristics and abilities affect the team diversity and
the latter, in turn, may affect the team performance. To test our first assumption, we
estimate a degree of national diversity for every teams participation at the Tour de
France16 . From the extensive database for the 2001-2013 Tour de France, we construct
a metric of average linguistic distance (ALD) between every team members native language on a cycling team. The linguistic distance is based on the Automated Similarity
Judgment Program (ASJP), a program that calculates the similarity of languages on
the scale of 0-100 for every pair of languages17 . We surmise that each riders native
language corresponds to the native language of their home country, with regards to
exceptions such as multi-lingual cyclists from Belgium and Switzerland18 . We first
compute the score generated by ASJP to every professional rider language pair com16 We also compute a degree of national diversity using a Blau (1977) index. The Blaus index, also known as HerfindahlHirschman index (HHI), is particularly appropriate to measure the
of categorical variables such as riders
P diversity
2
nationality. It computational formula is given as follows: H = 1 n
i=1 pi where pi represents the proportion of group
members in the ith category. In our dataset, the degree of national diversity based on the shares of teams riders from
the same or different categories varies between 0 to 0.875. The maximum, namely (n 1)/n, occurs when all riders of
a same team are spread equally - also called evenness in the ecological literature (Harrison and Klein, 2007). As an
example, the Team Phonak Hearing Systems entered a squad with 8 different nationalities in the 2006 Tour de France
and therefore contributed to a higher Blaus index (H = 0.875). Conversely, fully homogeneous teams such as the
Russian Katusha Team or the French teams Europcar and Ag2r La Mondiale who only enrolled domestic riders are
assigned a value of zero.
17 For further details about the Automated Similarity Judgment Program, see the paper of Bakker et al. (2009).
18 We determine the native language of Swiss and Belgian riders according to their place of birth.

24

binations19 . In the second step, we calculate an Average Linguistic Distance score for
each team20 , which represents the national diversity on a given cycling team, from a
linguistic perspective (Ingersoll et al., 2013). This index is defined by:
n

11X
ALDit =
LDit
n k i=1
In our opinion, the Linguistic Distance constitutes a more accurate proxy to capture
the various effects of national diversity on teams productivity for several reasons. First,
beyond the linguistic spectrum, this index takes into account the variety of attributes
associated with a common language (Lazear, 1999a). The latter cultural dimensions
have a decisive influence on cooperation and group cohesion. In this regard, it is worth
bearing in mind that the Blau (1977) index doesnt account for nationalities who share
the same official language and cultural traits (i.e. English-speaking nations). Second,
this proxy of national diversity accounts for subgroups that are based on common
beliefs and value system across national borders. By providing a better picture of the
complexity of the different national interactions, the Linguistic Distance allows us to
consider the predictive validity of the similarity/attraction theory (Byrne, 1972) and
the social categorization theory (Tajfel and Turner, 1979)21 . Finally, the index presents
the main advantage of estimating the dissimilarity between languages which may play
a major role in group-functioning and may cause communication problems.
In our resulting sample, a cycling team in which an official language is shared by
all its team members is assigned a score of zero. Reversely, an heterogeneous team
in which teammates does not share any common language contributes to an higher
linguistic distance index. For instance, teams with more diverse workforce in terms of
19 See

appendix (Distance Matrix)

n!
divide the Linguistic Distance score by a binomial coefficient given by the expression k!(nk)!
and by the number
of riders. The number of language-combinations on a team (k) corresponds to the k-element subsets (language pair
combination) of an n-element subsets (number of official language on a given team). In estimating the average linguistic
distance per language-combinations and then the team average score, this allows us to control for the exponential
binomial coefficient and for teams size.
21 To put it in more concrete terms, the 2013 Katusha Team chiefly includes a Spanish subgroup and a subgroup
composed of riders from Russian speaking countries (Russia, Belarus and Latvia). The Russian team was assigned an
Average Linguistic Distance of 10.43 taking into account the linguistic distance between the two subgroups.
20 We

25

linguistic distance, such as the 2013 Danish Team Saxo-Tinkoff , were assigned a score
of 12.56, whereas the average linguistic score was 8.39 (see table 2). Finally, Figure
2 shows a kernel density distribution of the first diversity proxy Linguistic Distance.
Interestingly, a number of professional cycling teams employ a workforce sharing only
one common language. This first interpretation of Figure 2 leads to the thought that
Hypothesis 1 must be tested.

5.2.2

Talent Disparity

Individuals within cycling teams may also differ on less visible characteristics such as
specific skills and abilities. As talent is unobservable, we use individual productivity
to proxy riders abilities (Franck and Nesch, 2010). Professional cycling has the main
advantage of providing a huge amount of data which allows individual performance
investigation. According to Alesina et al. (2000), excellent talents refers to those who
produce an above-average amount of product and poor talent means those who do much
less than average. When a sport manager speaks of quality talent, he refers to those
individuals who make the most points and can be identified as essential for success.
Critical to our research design, we measure individual quality by the number of cycling
quotient (CQ)22 points of the riders selected for the Tour de France. We agree with the
approach of Rogge et al. (2013) to rely on CQ point scales which remains as a point
of reference in comparison to other point rankings. Following on from this, we collect
CQ values for all 2,462 professional cyclists who took part in the Tour de France. Our
approach is to employ the CQ value earned on the Tour de France, estimated on the
eve of the current Tour, as measure of individual talent23 .
22 The CQ-ranking is a world ranking of professional road cyclists based on their performances during the last 12
months. It can be seen as the non-official successor of the UCI-ranking, which disappeared when the ProTour was
introduced in 2005. Information on how individual CQ values are calculated and on the point scales used is available on
the CQ website (www.cqranking.com).
23 A second approach to measure the riders ability is to use the total CQ points gained during his whole professional
career in all competitions prior the race. In a first step, we estimateP
the current riders productivity
P before to calculate
the individual riders talent using the following formula: pit = 2 CQ(T otal)it1 + 1 pit =
CQ(T otal)it2 . In

giving more weight to recent performance, we take into account the current physical condition of individuals, who need
to be well prepared and to achieve a certain level of fitness to enter La Grande Boucle. In a second step, we compute
the variation in productivity among riders on a same team using coefficient of variation (CV ) and the mean.

26

We expect that riders who accumulated experience on the Tour de France and who
consequently developed specific abilities to perform better than less experienced riders.
In addition, more experienced riders are better aware of dangers and know how to spare
effort in previous stages to increase the chance being part of a successful breakaway
(Torgler, 2007). In the first part, we estimate the stock of CQ points accumulated
during former Tours de France, in the second part, we compute their average CQ
value24 . The following individual riders productivity (pit ) represents thus the existent
riders talent based on his average prior performance:

pit =

1X
CQ(T DF )it1
n t1

Figure 1 presents the kernel estimate of the individual riders performance prior
to the Tours de France. The graphical illustration brings additional evidence to the
presence of an aristocracy of talent, the individual performance being distinctly skewed
to the right and the tail of a distribution describing team leaders productivity. The
graphical inspection seems to support the argument that the hierarchical organization
in professional cycling reflects on performance inequalities among riders25 . This allows
us to test Hypothesis 2 stating that skill dispersion is beneficial to team productivity.
It should be noted that we proxy talent heterogeneity measuring productivity disparity.
In consequence, skill dispersion on a squad reflects the variation in productivity among
its riders.
As a measure of teams talent disparity, we subsequently calculated a coefficient of
variation (CV ) and the mean. The CV Performance Index captures the asymmetry
between team members, generally speaking the distance between riders and the dominance of those, the team leaders, who have higher amount of capabilities (Harrison
and Klein, 2007). The Mean Performance Index describes the aggregated team riding ability. Table 2 summarizes the input variable. The 2009 team Skil-Shimano and
24 In our view, the average riders performance provides a fair picture of the overall riders talent, since it smoothes
any distortions due to injuries or bad seasonal performances.
25 In the same way, we calculate the kernel estimate of the individual riders performance from past seasons and we
also obtain a positively skewed distribution (see appendix).

27

Figure 1: Distribution of Riders Productivity (on the Tour de France)

Prior Tours de France

.01
0

.005

Density

.015

.005
Density
.015
.01
.005
2
0
200
400
600
800
1000
Individual
Kernel
Normal
kernel
00 =
density
density
epanechnikov,
Performance
estimatebandwidth
Index
= 8.28
on

200

400

600

800

1000

Individual Performance Index on Prior Tours de France

Kernel density estimate
kernel = epanechnikov, bandwidth = 8.28

Normal density

Notes: The figure shows kernel estimates of the distribution of the average individual riders performance on
previous Tours de France (n = 2462). We used an Epanechnikov kernel.

the 2010 team Footon-Servetto were endowed with CV P erf ormance Index = 0 value
because both teams enter riders who never collected any CQ points in previous Tours
de France. On the opposite, the 2001 Spanish team Euskaltel-Euskad i, the 2001 Italian team Fassa Bortolo and the Dutch team Vacansoleil-DCM reached a maximum
CV P erf ormance Index = 3, while the average value was 1.31. Figure 2 depicts kernel estimates of the talent diversity measure CV Performance Index , calculated at the
team-level. The graph shows a distribution following a normal distribution.

5.3

Output Variables

As a standard in the literature of Sports Economics, we measure the cycling team

performance by the teams sporting success. In our opinion, the complex nature of
professional cycling requires special attention and we concur with the conclusion of
Rogge et al. (2013) that the multiple-prize nature of the Tour de France and the ex
ante diversity of team ambitions need to be taken up in order to ensure proper analysis.
Therefore, we define two dependent variables, all aggregated at the team level: Total
CQ Points and Team Leader Performance.
28

Figure 2: Distribution of Professional Riders Diversity

.2V
D
.8
.6
.4
.2
Density
0
1
2
C
3
CV
Kernel
Normal
kernel
ensity
Performance
=
density
density
epanechnikov,
estimateIndex
bandwidth = .1

.4

.6

Density

.3
.2

.2

.1

Density

.8

.4

.5

.10
Density
.5
.4
.3
.2
.1
0
1
5
10
15
Linguistic
Kernel
Normal
kernel
=
density
density
epanechnikov,
Distance
estimatebandwidth = .23

10

15

Linguistic Distance

CV Performance Index

Kernel density estimate

Kernel density estimate

Normal density

Normal density

kernel = epanechnikov, bandwidth = .23

kernel = epanechnikov, bandwidth = .1

Notes: The figure shows kernel estimates of the distribution of the two explanatory variables Linguistic Distance
and CV Performance Index at the team-level (n = 265). We used an Epanechnikov kernel.

The Tour de France is organized in four main competitions: the general classification
is the oldest classification and the most coveted, its leader wears the yellow jersey (le
maillot jaune), the symbol of the Tour de France. The mountains classification is the
second oldest jersey awarding competition in the Tour and the rider with the highest
total of climbing points wears the polka-dot jersey (le maillot poids). Concerning
the points classification, the best world class sprinters compete for the leader green
jersey (le maillot vert). Finally, the young rider classification is restricted to the riders
who are under the age of 26, the leader wearing the white jersey (le maillot blanc).
Whereas riders with the lowest aggregate time become the leader of the yellow and
the white jersey classifications, sprinters and climbers compete to collect the greatest
number of points and win the polka-dot and green jersey classifications. In all four
classifications a degressive principle giving higher weights to better positions and lower
weights to lower ranks is applied. In choosing the ranking as dependent variable, we
follow the approach of Torgler (2007) and Rogge et al. (2013), who argue that it is the
order, rather than the distance between two riders, that matters. The reason is that
many incentives such as the overall prize money and the different jerseys are related
to the rank. Furthermore, the time difference depends on uncontrolled races features
(distances, weather conditions,...) that change from year to year and therefore does not
29

allow time series analysis.

The first output variable, Total CQ Points, is based on the amount of CQ points
collected in three classifications (general ranking, points classification, and mountain
classification) and in stage wins. We compute an average of the total CQ points at the
team level in order to take into account the different size of teams. More generally,
this output variable encompasses the full spectrum of the three main cycling disciplines
of the Tour de France (with exceptions of the the young rider and the Prix de la
combativit classifications) and individual victories. In doing so, we take into account
the different success opportunities and the various team aspirations. It should be noted
that ordinarily teams entering the Tour de France can be classified into three distinct
categories: ranking teams compete for the yellow jersey and generally win mountain
stages, crucial for the GR. Sprint teams aim for the points classifications and for stage
victories. Lastly, mixed teams remain on the lookout for opportunity to win a stage
(Rogge et al., 2013). Finally, it is worth mentioning that different team ambitions
are reflected in the team composition. To give an example, the 2013 ranking team
Sky Procycling carefully selected the best constellation of teammates able to help their
favourite, Chris Froome, to win the general classification.
Our second output variable consists in the Team Leader Performance, based on the
number of CQ points collected by team leaders. We assume that the performance of
the captain, based on a hierarchical organization, reflects the team production in a
particular context of professional cycling, described in the previous section. Hence,
team leaders evolving in well-functioning and cohesive teams should achieve better
performance and thus gather higher amounts of CQ points.

5.4

Control Variables

Several control variables are integrated into our model. As we analyze the influence of
diversity on cycling teams performance, we need to look at team-by-team consistency
to capture teams rather than individual effects.
30

We first estimate the Team Experience as the number of participations in former

Tour de France. In our view, professional riders with experience on previous Tours de
France develop specific skills and abilities and are so, more likely to outperform or at
least to reach Les Champs-lyses. Torgler (2007) shows that riders evolving in more
experienced teams perform better, ceteris paribus. On average, teams competing at the
Tour de France took part slightly more than twice in the race. Likewise, it is necessary
to check the effects of team tenure since the latter is essential in professional cycling
to build a core of domestics around the team leader. We defined the Team Tenure
as the number of years riders are running for the current team. Tenure may play a
prominent role in a particular context of a cycling team, common goals and experiences
may develop a common identity and ensure cooperation among riders by attenuating
the negative effect of diversity (Chatman and Flynn, 2001). In the resulting sample the
Team Tenure is around for more than 3 years.
Then, we take into account riders who finished the Tour and incorporate the control
variable Number Riders Finishing. As team production in professional cycling relies on
a clear division of labour, we surmise that cycling teams reaching the finish line with
a complete squad should outperform. On the contrary, teams in which several riders
were forced to quit the race may be less likely to achieve good results. Indeed, these
abandonments may destabilized the fragile team dynamic and imperil the chances of
success. During the 2001-2013 period, teams reached the finish line with an average
of 7 riders. Figure 3 shows the associated barplots, which bring support to potential
advantage to complete the race with the maximum of riders. On average, teams finishing
the race with more than 6 riders collect more CQ points (t=4.87, p<0.05) and allow
their favourite to deliver better performance (t=4.19, p<0.05).
In order to control for team composition, we also integrate the variable Team Top20
to count how many times a team was already among the Top20 in the past Tours de
France. The intuition behind this is that cycling teams with some million Euros worth
of professional riders do not necessarily achieve better performance than single star

31

Figure 3: Number Riders Finishing and Team Performance

8.8
1
0
23.7
40
30
20
10
Team
NumberFinishingRiders<=6
NumberFinishingRiders>6
0
Leader Performance

30
20

8.8

Team Leader Performance

43.4

23.7

10

50

71.5

25

Total CQ Points

75

40

100

43.4
2
0
71.5
100
75
50
25
Total
NumberFinishingRiders<=6
NumberFinishingRiders>6
5
CQ Points

NumberFinishingRiders<=6

NumberFinishingRiders<=6

NumberFinishingRiders>6

NumberFinishingRiders>6

Notes: The figures depict the average teams performance (n = 265) for teams who fail to complete the race
with equal or less than 6 riders (n = 65) and those who reach the final line with more than 6 riders (n = 201).

teams (Prinz and Wicker, 2012). As the composition of a team matters significantly,
this variable allows us double check on Hypothesis 2 . A nine-rider team in a Tour de
France has an average of 5 Top20 finishes.
The composition of a Grand Tour squad varies depending on the teams objectives.
In order to monitor team aspirations, we finally define three types of cycling teams.
According to Rogge et al. (2013), to be qualified as Ranking Teams, teams need to line
up at least one rider who ranked among the top 10 of the general classification Tour de
France in year t 1 or t 2, or in the top 5 in year t 3 or t 4. Teams that enter the
Tour with at least one rider who ranked among the top 5 of the points classification Tour
de France in year t1 or t2, where qualified as Sprint Teams. If a team satisfied both
types criteria, it was automatically considered as a ranking team. At last, teams that
do not fit in the previous categories were categorized as Mixed Teams. The majority
of cycling teams where qualified as Ranking Teams (56.6%), while Sprint Teams and
Mixed Teams represent 18.1% and 25.2% of our resulting sample, respectively.

5.5

Methodology

To answer our main research questions, we regress cycling teams sporting success on

32

Table 2: Descriptive Statistics: Tour de France Cycling Teams 2001-2013 (N = 265)

Variables

Mean

S.D.

Minimum Maximum

Linguistic Distance

8.311

3.063

12.567

CV Performance Index

1.318

0.460

Mean Performance Index

52.231

34.680

236.790

Total CQ Points

64.733

41.968

13.111

255.888

Team Leader Performance

20.080

25.435

114.33

Team Experience

2.213

1.155

6.777

Team Tenure

3.160

1.165

6.666

Number Riders Finishing

7.283

1.293

Team Top-20

5.166

5.108

21

Ranking Teams

0.566

0.496

Sprint Teams

0.181

0.385

Mixed Teams

0.252

0.435

Input Variables

Output Variables

Control Variables

the degree of national diversity, on the measure of talent disparity and on a number of
control variables. We integrate team fixed-effects to account for individual rider heterogeneity and for unobserved team abilities which may induce biased estimators (Prinz
and Wicker, 2012). Moreover, we estimate White-robust standard errors adjusted to
check potential heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation disturbance. To test for possible
effects of riders national heterogeneity (Hypothesis 1) and skill dispersion (Hypothesis
2) on cycling team-level production in the 2001-13 Tour de France, we estimate the
following models:
(1)

T eam P erf ormanceit = 0 + 1 CV P Iit + 2 M eanP Iit + 3 Controlsit + it

(2)

T eam P erf ormanceit = 0 + 1 LDit + 2 Controlsit + it

where the subscripts i and t refer to team i and year t, respectively. Basically, team
productivity is a function of the measures of diversity among professional riders of the
same team and of an error term it . The dependent variable Team Performance corresponds to the measures of teams sporting success i on the Tour de France in the year
33

t. The multiple-prize nature of the Tour de France is taken up by the output variables
Total CQ Points and Team Leader Performance (Rogge et al., 2013). Altogether, six
models are estimated with models 1 to 3 slightly differing from models 4 to 6 regarding
the entered variables. In order to eliminate alternative explanations of team productivity, we include different control mechanisms that allow us to identify the coefficients
of interest 1 , the level of riders diversity on a team. In addition, the variable Mean
Performance Index (i.e. the aggregated team riding ability, M P I) is held constant to
control the different levels of productivity among cycling teams.
In model 1, we integrate four control variables (i.e. Team Experience, Team Top20 ,
Mixed Teams and Sprint Teams) to isolate the effects of talent heterogeneity estimated
in terms of variation in productivity among teams members (CV P I) on the dependent
variable Total CQ Points. We include team types to account for the different team
aspirations and strategies that may be correlated with the output variable. The control
variable Team Experience monitors the potential benefit from past participations on
the Tour. In model 2, we regress Total CQ Points on the proxy of national diversity
measured in terms of Linguistic Distance (LD) and only integrate Team Experience.
In models 4 and 5, we separately regress Team Leader Performance on the two
diversity proxies and replace Mixed Teams, Sprint Teams and Team Experience by the
control variables Team Tenure and Number Riders Finishing. We include Team Tenure
to test the potential benefit from being longer with the present team and Number Riders
Finishing to examine the peculiarities of team production in professional cycling. More
specifically, the more teams members sharing the load until the finish line, the better
the captains performance.
In models 3 and 6, we enter both measures of riders diversity to test simultaneous
influence on team productivity. In accordance with the theoretical argument by Lazear
(1999b) and the empirical findings of Brandes et al. (2009), stating that there may be
nation-specific skills in team-sports industry, we expect complementarity effects between
national diversity and talent disparity.

34

Results

Does diversity influence team productivity in professional cycling ? This section discusses the empirical results in the context of the research questions. First, the relationship between the national heterogeneity, skill dispersion and teams sporting success is
scrutinized in order to assess the validity of the hypotheses. Fixed-effects regression
results for the 2001-2013 Tour de France are then discussed and commented.

6.1

Robustness Checking

Before we turn to the analysis of the fixed-effects regressions, we aim to present preliminary results of the influence of riders diversity on teams sporting success. We perform
basic robustness checks to test the validity of the model described in the previous section
and to make initial predictions regarding the research question.
First of all, we graphically compare the firm-level output across teams employing a
workforce composed of riders from different nationalities and those who share only one
common language. Figure 4 shows the associated barplots, which provide preliminary
evidence on the beneficial effects of national diversity, from a linguistic perspective,
on teams sporting success and therefore support Hypothesis 1 . Heterogeneous cycling
teams collect on average more CQ points (67.3 CQs) than homogeneous teams (44.9
CQs) in all competitions of the Tour de France. A t-test shows that this difference is
statistically highly significant (t=2.73, p<0.05). Likewise, the second graph of Figure
4 shows that the linguistic distance has a positive impact on team leaders performance. Team leaders in heterogeneous teams collect more CQ points (21 CQs) than
homogeneous teams (12.6 CQs). A t-test supports the evidence of potential benefits of
multinational cycling teams on the performance of their favourite (t=1.69), p<0.05)
In a similar way, we compare cycling team-level output across the groups of teams
employing a workforce with a similar and diverse range of ability. Figure 5 presents
graphical illustrations of positive relation between talent disparity and team produc-

35

Figure 4: The Effects of National Diversity on Cycling Team Performance

12.6
1
0
21.0
40
30
20
10
Team
LinguisticDistance=0
LinguisticDistance>0
0
Leader Performance

30

12.6

21.0
20

Team Leader Performance

44.9

10

50

67.3

25

Total CQ Points

75

40

100

44.9
2
0
67.3
100
75
50
25
Total
LinguisticDistance=0
LinguisticDistance>0
5
CQ Points

LinguisticDistance=0

LinguisticDistance>0

LinguisticDistance=0

LinguisticDistance>0

Notes: This figure depicts the average teams performance (n = 265) for homogeneous teams who share one
common language (n = 30) and those who share more than one common language (n = 235).

tivity. On average, teams with highly dispersed riding skill levels gain more CQ points
during the whole race (71.5 CQs) and outperform homogeneous teams (61.5 CQs). Similar findings were found using the second output variable Team Leader Performance.
Captain being part on a cycling team with higher variation in productivity among its
team members picks up more CQ points (19.6 CQs) in comparison to homogeneous
teams (14.1 CQs). A t-test supports the potential benefits of skill dispersion on the
productivity of their favourite (t=2.18, p<0.05). These preliminary findings supports
Hypothesis 2 that teams employing an heterogeneous workforce in terms of productivity
measures outperform homogeneous teams.

6.2

Empirical Results

Table 3 illustrates the coefficients, the level of significance and the robust standard
errors of the empirical analysis, which investigates team performance as a dependent
variable using team fixed-effects regression models for the 2001-13 Tour de France26 .
Interestingly, they show that the two diversity components of professional cycling teams
generally influence team productivity in the predicted manner.
26 We also run fixed-effects regressions using an alternative measure of national diversity and talent disparity. The
results are displayed in appendix (see. Alternative Fixed Effect Regression).

36

Figure 5: The Effects of Talent Disparity on Cycling Team Performance

14.1
1
5
0
19.6
20
15
10
Team
CV_PI
0
<=
>
Leader
1.03
1.03 Performance
19.6

20

80

61.5
2
0
71.5
80
60
40
20
Total
CV_PI
0
CQ
<=1.03
>
1.03
Points

10

Team Leader Performance

60
40

Total CQ Points

20
0

14.1

61.5

15

71.5

CV_PI <= 1.03

CV_PI > 1.03

CV_PI <= 1.03

CV_PI > 1.03

Notes: This figure depicts the average Team Leader Performance (n = 265) for teams with lower coefficient of
variation of Performance Index (n = 65) and those with higher degree (> 1.03) of talent disparity (n = 200).
We arbitrarily define a threshold level at 1.03 (the 25th percentile of the normal distribution).

In models 2 and 5, we find that the degree of national heterogeneity does not have a
significant impact on team productivity in spite of the increasing internationalization in
professional cycling. The coefficient of Linguistic Distance has a positive effect on the
productivity measures Total CQ Points (column 2) and Team Leader Performance (column 5). The control variables Team Experience (model 2), Team Tenure and Number
Riders Finishing (model 5) have significant positive coefficients on the teams sporting
success (statistically significant at the 1% and 10% level, respectively). Thus, more
experienced teams and teams which build a core of domestics around the favourite are
more likely to collect more CQ points during the Tour de France. Apparently, national
heterogeneity does not have a great impact on cycling teams productivity. Some intuition for this moderating effect was stated in previous studies (Brandes et al., 2009).
It has already been proven that language is usually one of the main channels where
national diversity affects team performance (Haas and Nesch, 2012). However, since
the organizational context in professional cycling matters, national diversity, expressed
in terms of Linguistic Distance, could certainly play a secondary role. The reason is
that teams imperatives rely on little verbal communication and specific tasks are assigned to every team members before each stage. These results are in accordance with

37

the previous study of Kochan et al. (2003) where national diversity had no significant
effects on team performance. Thus far, Hypothesis 1 is not supported by the empirical results. However, it may be recalled that, despite the few empirical evidence in
favour of the first research question, results do not uphold similarity/attraction and
social-categorization theories (Byrne, 1972; Tajfel and Turner, 1979).
The further fixed-effects regression results show that cycling teams employing a
more skill diversified workforce gain an advantage in team productivity. In column 1,
the CV s of individual productivity levels have a statistically significant coefficient (at
the 5% level) in the Total CQ Points regression, holding the average riding ability,
Team Experience, Team Top20, Sprint Teams, Mixed Teams, and unobserved team
heterogeneity variables constant. Although these control variables have anticipated
sign, they are not significant statistically at the 10% confidence level. Teams qualified
as Sprint Teams and Mixed Teams perform better than the reference group (Ranking
Teams) and Team Experience has a positive influence on the amount of CQ points
collected. We also observe that the number of Team Top20 finishes decreases the teams
sporting success. The positive influence of talent heterogeneity (statistically significant
at the 1% level) on team performance is confirmed in the second regression (column 4).
More importantly, the significance of talent disparity is obtained holding average team
ability, Team Top20 , Team Tenure and Number Riders Finishing constant. Similar to
model 1, the negative coefficient of Team Top20 provides evidence that teams composed
of several star riders are counterproductive. These results also show that the number
of riders completing the Tour de France (Number Riders Finishing) is statistically
significant, while riding longer with the same team (Team Tenure) does not influence
team productivity considerably. Thus, these findings, in accordance with the study of
Prinz and Wicker (2012), support Hypothesis 2 , predicting that talent heterogeneity is
beneficial to team performance.
We refine our analysis by running two additional regressions to test a potential
complementarity effect of teams diversity (Lazear, 1999b; Brandes et al., 2009). The

38

results, displayed in columns 3 and 6, suggest that the incorporation of both measures of
teams heterogeneity does not lead to compelling effects. In the same way as regression
models 2-5, we find no consistent evidence that national diversity influences the teams
sporting success in any significant ways. However, talent disparity has been proven to
have a major impact statistically on the dependent variables (as in models 1 and 4).

Table 3: Fixed Effect Regressions For Cycling Team Performance (Tour de France 2001-13)
(1)
Variables

(2)

(3)

Total CQ Points
0.702
(0.752)

Linguistic Distance

(4)

(5)

(6)

Team Leader Performance

0.741
(0.709)

0.201
(0.415)

0.215
(0.076)

CV Performance Index

10.482**
(5.086)

10.271**
(5.086)

8.837***
(3.142)

8.834***
(3.1498)

Mean Performance
Index

0.455***
(0.137)

0.456***
(0.136)

0.245***
(0.076)

0.245***
(0.076)

Team Experience

5.164
(3.67)

8.478***
(3.044)

5.019
(3.665)

Team Tenure

1.903
(1.934)

3.467*
(1.8625)

1.906
(1.939)

Number Riders
Finishing

2.91***
(0.982)

3.466***
(1.103)

2.883***
(0.987)

-0.106
(0.742)

-0.100
(0.745)

REF

REF

Sprint Teams

7.903
(6.548)

10.108
(6.909)

Mixed Teams

9.760
(6.885)

7.195
(6.707)

Constant

12.483
(12.4)

R2

0.328

Prob > F
Teams

Team Top20
Ranking Teams

Observations

40.125***
(8.929)

-0.108
(0.389)

-0.108
(0.39)

6.931
(13.43)

-31.027***
(9.679)

-17.799*
(9.192)

-32.641***
(10.047)

0.416

0.325

0.338

0.462

0.335

0.001
44

0.013
44

0.001
44

0.000
44

0.000
44

0.000
44

265

265

265

265

265

265

Note: Robust standard errors (White, 1980) are reported, levels of significance: * p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, ***
p < 0.01

39

Concluding Discussion

This papers separately investigates the influence of cycling teams diversity on team
production using the Tour de France as a labor market laboratory. We analyze specifically, the relation between group diversity based on two individual attributes, namely
the nationality and the talent, on the total of CQ points collected during the race and
on the performance of team leaders. In relying on team-level data from the years 2001
to 2013, the team fixed-effects results show that talent disparity is beneficial to teams
sporting success. However, we also find that national diversity does not have a great
impact on team performance.
Some intuition of our findings can be given by particular nature of professional
cycling. As cycling teams rely on a hierarchical structure where domestics abandon
personal ambition to serve their captain, collective performance distinctively depends
on the continuous interaction between riders. As a matter of fact, team cooperation is
one of the keys to success. According to our empirical results, we find evidence proving
that talent disparity is a crucial factor to ensure a strong team chemistry. We finally
attribute a large part of the efficiency of cycling teams production process to the degree
of skill dispersion. In other words, teams employing a workforce with a broad range of
ability are more likely to be cohesive, and in turn, more productive and resolute in the
efforts of achieving common goals. Moreover, these findings about the potential gain
of talent diversity are in accordance with the first condition of Lazear (1999b)s framework and the existing theory (Hamilton et al., 2003, 2004). The organizational context
of professional cycling race also provides additional insights regarding the moderating
effect from national diversity on team performance. Given the division of labor aspect,
cyclists are embedded in a routinized process. Based on repetitive tasks, the training
routine leaves little room for communication and may attenuate the influence from national diversity on team performance. In addition, sports directors manage the best
selection teammates enable to serve the captain and avoid additional costs in employing
culturally diverse riders. Thus far, our results support the notion that organizational
40

pattern specific to professional road cycling may overcome language and cultural barriers and negative effects from national diversity as predicted by theory (Byrne, 1972;
Tajfel and Turner, 1979; Lazear, 1999b).
Regarding the practical implications, this empirical paper sheds new light on the existence of a direct positive effect of group diversity on teams sporting success. However,
we need to be careful when generalizing our findings to other areas of team production. According to Harder (1992), the same properties that made the sports industry
an environment conducive to research also restrict the generalizability of the present
study. The peculiarities surrounding the professional road cycling considerably enforce
the concern about the external validity, in particular. However, we derived some general implications that could be applied to other team production contexts. Our analysis
suggests that the distribution of skills emerges as a significant driver in performance
and definitely reinforces team chemistry. Thanks to the strong hierarchical structure
in cycling teams, teammates and the captain are assigned specific tasks contributing
collectively to the team output. This finding is of great interest for the business world
where success depends on the cooperation of highly able and less able workers. In order
to preserve team cohesion, it would be desirable to set up compensation systems that
also look after low-skilled employees (Prinz and Wicker, 2012). In addition, it can be
recommended to integrate workers of different national backgrounds in a training routine which would clearly defines specific tasks. This routinized process combined with
incentive schemes and a merit-based career system should avoid any communication
problems and sustain motivation during the whole production process.
From a conceptual perspective, we note that there could be an obvious risk of selection bias since sports directors select the best constellation of riders forming a cohesive
team with great care. It thus follows that such cyclists are not only selected on the
basis of their skills and specialization, but also on their ability to cooperate and their
readiness to abandon personal ambition to work for the team. Finally, the present study
could be extended to the two others prestigious three-week-long Grand Tours, the Giro

41

and the Vuelta. It might be also interesting to investigate the varying effect of diversity
on cycling teams participating in single-day cycling races such as the Monuments,
Milan-San Remo, Tour of Flanders, Paris-Roubaix, Lige-Bastogne-Lige and Giro di
Lombardia.
To conclude, we agree with Torgler (2007) when he states that: Without any doubt,
the economics of cycling has a future and will allow to investigate many interesting
topics.

42

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45

A
A.1

Tables and Figures

Distance Matrix - Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP)

Figure 6: Distance Matrix (Illustration of the Linguistic Distance Variable for Every Language Pair
Combination)

46

A.2

Alternative Fixed Effects Regression

Table 4: Alternative Regressions: Fixed Effects Regressions For Cycling Team Performance (Tour de
France 2001-13)
(1)
Variables

Mean Performance
Index

Team Experience

(3)

Total CQ Points
4.935
(12.215)

National diversity
CV Performance Index

(2)

(6)

3.142
(6.935)

2.66
(6.749)

-1.904
(8.441)

-1.843
(8.431)

12.956***
(5.789)

12.976***
(5.776)

0.039***
(0.008)

0.039***
(0.008)

0.015***
(0.006)

0.013***
(0.006)

5.101
(3.303)

8.54***
(3.028)

5.068
(3.294)

Number Riders
Finishing
-0.608
(0.691)

-0.601
(0.696)

REF

REF

Sprint Teams

8.993
(7.584)

8.906
(7.573)

Mixed Teams

3.657
(6.257)

3.507
(6.267)

Constant

9.354
(12.85)

Ranking Teams

(5)

Team Leader Performance

3.783
(11.994)

Team Tenure

Team Top20

(4)

43.106***
(10.314)

2.145
(1.872)

3.532*
(1.887)

2.208
(1.894)

3.345***
(1.056)

3.449***
(1.115)

3.309***
(1.069)

-0.269
(0.404)

-0.269
(0.404)

7.29
(15.12)

-38.424***
(11.374)

-17.935*
(9.305)

-39.803***
(11.591)

R2

0.363

0.411

0.358

0.396

0.456

0.39

Prob > F
Teams

0.000
44

0.019
44

0.000
44

0.000
44

0.000
44

0.000
44

265

265

265

265

265

265

Observations

Note: Robust standard errors (White, 1980) are reported, levels of significance: * p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, ***
p < 0.01

47

A.3

Independent Two-Sample t-tests

Figure 7: Descriptive Statistics, t-tests (CV Performance Index and Linguistic Distance)

48

Figure 8: Descriptive Statistics, t-tests (Number Finishing Riders)

49

A.4

Distribution of Alternative Measures

Figure 9: Distribution of Riders Productivity (on Previous Seasons)

.0004
0

.0002

Density

.0006

.0008

.0002
Density
.0008
.0006
.0004
.0002
2
0
2000
4000
6000
8000
Individual
Kernel
Normal
kernel
000 =
density
density
epanechnikov,
Performance
estimatebandwidth
Index=Prior
159.19
Seasons

2000

4000

6000

8000

Individual Performance Index Prior Seasons

Kernel density estimate
Normal density

kernel = epanechnikov, bandwidth = 159.19

Notes: The figure shows kernel estimates of the distribution of the average individual riders performance in
previous seasons (n = 2462). We used an Epanechnikov kernel.

Figure 10: Distribution of Professional Riders Diversity (Seasonal Proxy of Talent)

D5
.Density
0
.5
1
t1.5
2
talentCV
Kernel
Normal
kernel
Kernel
alentCV
.5
ensity
= density
epanechnikov,
density
density
estimate
bandwidth
estimate
= .08

.5

Density
1

1.5

Kernel density estimate

.5

1
talentCV

1.5

Kernel density estimate

Normal density
kernel = epanechnikov, bandwidth = .08

Notes: The figure shows kernel estimates of the distribution of the CV Performance Index at the team-level
(n = 265). We used an Epanechnikov kernel.

50

Eidesstattliche Erklrung
Der Verfasser erklrt an Eides statt, dass er die vorliegende Arbeit selbstndig, ohne
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Ort, Datum

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51