Diversity and Team Performance in a Kenyan Organization∗

We present findings from a field experiment on team diversity. Individuals working as canvassers in an elections-related experiment were randomly assigned a junior teammate, a senior manager and a set of households to visit. This created random variation in the degree of horizontal diversity, vertical (or hierarchical) diversity and external (or client) diversity within each team. We find that ethnic diversity among teammates decreases team performance, while diversity along the vertical dimension improves performance. The data on time use suggests that horizontally homogeneous teams organized tasks in a more efficient way, while vertically homogeneous teams exerted lower effort.