Do Gender-Diverse Teams Deliver Better Operational Performance: An Experimental Study

The routines-based approach to operations management emphasizes the role of routines in operational performance. However, little is known about how gender diversity in teams could alter coordination and change behaviors of team members, potentially impacting performance. In this study, we report on two laboratory experiments that induce routines to assess the stability of coordination and adaptability to organizational changes across mixed-gender teams of varying diversity and empirically examine operational performance via routines. Based on frequentist and Bayesian statistical approaches, our findings reveal that compared to other mixed-gender teams, balanced-gender teams (a) attain stability in routines faster, (b) exhibit varying levels of adaptability to internal and external changes, and (c) deliver better economic benefits via resource- and time-efficiencies under normal and change conditions, and this is attributable to their higher pace of routine formation. We find the operational-performance effect more prominent in situations of change than in normal conditions. Alongside our theoretical contributions, our study has several implications for management and effective operations management in terms of team composition, hiring, and staffing decisions.