Abstract
Diversity and inclusion (D&I) are of vital importance for organizations that wish to nurture a culture of equality. Despite a growing research interest, especially in the firm-level performance effect of diversity in top management teams, there is scant research on how bio-demographic D&I measures impact team-level operational outcomes of work teams. This study examines how the inclusion of women and older employees affects the performance of sales teams of telecommunication technology. We focus on these two aspects of D&I, as gender discrimination and ageism are prevalent in the technology sector. To test our hypotheses, we use a panel dataset of 260 sales teams. We account for the endogeneity of assigning members to the teams and the dynamic panel bias by estimating our model with the system generalized methods of moments (S-GMM) approach. The results suggest that greater inclusion of women and older employees is associated with increased sales performance, even for teams in the technology sector that inhabit a fast-paced environment. These findings are robust to alternative model specifications, as well as alternative operationalizations of the inclusion of women and older employees. Taken together, this study corroborates the business case of promoting the greater inclusion of women and older employees in the technology sector.