Collaboration and Cultural Homophily in Global Teams

Abstract

How do cultural barriers related to nationality, colonial legacy and language affect collaboration in multinational teams? We address this question by creating and exploiting an exhaustive dataset recording all 10.7 million passes by 7 thousand professional European football players from 132 countries fielded by all 154 teams competing in the top 5 men leagues over 8 sporting seasons, together with full information on players’ and teams’ characteristics. We use a discrete choice model of players’ passing behavior as a baseline to separately identify collaboration due to biased cultural preferences (‘choice homophily’) from collaboration due to opportunities (‘induced homophily’). The outcome we focus on is the ‘pass rate’, defined as the count of passes from a passer to a receiver relative the passer's total passes when both players are fielded together in a half-season. We find strong evidence of choice homophily. Relative to the baseline, player pairs of same culture have a 2.50 percent higher pass rate. Passes between players of same nationality and between players of same colonial legacy but different nationality are associated respectively with 3.01 and 2.34 percent higher pass rates. Speaking the same language without sharing the same nationality nor the same colonial legacy has a negligible effect. These findings show that choice homophily based on culture is pervasive even in teams of very high skill individuals with clear common objectives and aligned incentives, who are involved in interactive tasks that are well defined, readily monitored and not particularly language intensive.