Managing cultural diversity in high performance sports teams

This thesis analyses the impact of cultural diversity within high performance team athletes. The main research question examines the overall role of cultural diversity, and how this relates to the outcomes: performance, satisfaction, and cohesion, from an individual as a team perspective. Furthermore, this research analyses if these potential outcomes are moderated by athlete’s multicultural personalities. As previous studies have shown that there is a big research gap about the effects of cultural diversity in the most high-pressured environment, that of high-performance sports teams. Which is also why this research is highly relevant and could also be applied to organizational psychology. This thesis uses a quantitative research approach, including a survey that is spread to high performance team athletes from countries and sports teams all over the world. After data collection, most participants happen to be female athletes, field hockey players, and with a Dutch nationality (N=157). The data was tested on regression and moderation analyses. Cultural diversity within a team was measured by the participants themselves and their own perspective on how diverse in terms of ethnicity and culture their team is. All outcome variables were run and tested through simple regression analyses, but no significance was found. When testing moderation analyses, also no significant moderation impact was found. Therefore, all hypotheses in this research were rejected. However, some multicultural personality traits do impact most of the outcome variables in a positive way. Also, professional athlete and gender were two controlled variables that were dummy coded and included throughout the whole analyses. Both showed some significant effects on the outcome variables. Professional athletes appear to score higher on individual performance, team performance, individual satisfaction, and team satisfaction. Gender showed significant result on cohesion, and men are scoring higher on this outcome variable compared to women. In sum, however not many significant effects were found, this study still provides a unique context of study, with a sample not easily accessible to everyone and should be therefore more elaborated on in the near future. Future studies could expand on this research and focus more on a specific country or sport, to narrow the sample even more and get a better understanding in combination with different viewpoints.