Over the top: Team composition and performance in Himalayan expeditions

Using a large sub-sample of expeditions from the “Himalayan Database”, we analyze the impact of a climbing team’s cultural value diversity on various performance outcomes. Irrespective of an already large (and still growing) body of theoretical and empirical research on the diversity-performance link, the study of the multifaceted concept “culture” under rather extreme conditions has hitherto been largely ignored. We extend the literature by focusing on the effects of the cultural value diversity of a commercial climbing team on expedition outcomes. We test our hypotheses using data from 1,168 expeditions that took place between 1990 and 2014 involving mostly “amateur” climbers from all over the world. We find that the probability of team success is positively influenced by a culturally more heterogeneous team composition. Individual-level analyses further reveal that an increase in a team member’s cultural distance increases the probability of individual success, but also the probability of experiencing an injury or death. This result shows that the higher collective performance in culturally diverse teams is driven by the isolation of single team members.