Context Factors and the Performance of Mobile Individuals in Research Teams

This article studies how workforce composition is related to a firm’s success in introducing radical innovations. Pre-vious studies have argued that teams composed of individuals with diverse backgrounds are able to perform moreinformation processing and make deeper use of the information, which is important to accomplish complex tasks.We suggest that this argument can be extended to the level of the aggregate workforce of high-technology firms. Inparticular, we argue that ethnic and higher education diversity within the workforce is associated with superior per-formance in radical innovation. Using a sample of 3,888 Swedish firms, this article demonstrates that having greaterworkforce diversity in terms of both ethnic background and educational disciplinary background is positively corre-lated to the share of a firm’s turnover generated by radical innovation. Having more external collaborations does,however, seem to reduce the importance of educational background diversity. The impact of ethnic diversity is notaffected by external collaboration. These findings hold after using alternative measures of dependent and indepen-dent variables, alternative sample sizes, and alternative estimation techniques. The research findings presented inthis article would seem to have immediate and important practical implications. They would suggest that companiesmay pursue recruitment policies inspired by greater ethnic and disciplinary diversity as a way to boost the innova-tiveness of the organ ization. From a managerial perspective, it may be conc luded tha t workforce disciplinary diver-sity could be potentially replaced by more external links, while ethnic diversity could not.