Diversité, conflits et performance dans les nouvelles entreprises : nouvelle approche, nouvelles évidences

African companies, including start-ups, have remarkably diverse managerial teams. This gives them access to more resources, but it can lead to various forms of conflict with beneficial or devastating effects. Focusing on the Cameroonian context, this article aims to better understand how the diversity of entrepreneurial teams influences the performance of new businesses, by integrating conflicts between its members as moderators of this relationship. We conducted a study on Cameroonian companies that had been founded in 2009 by at least two people, had adopted limited liability status, and were still in operation at the time of the survey in 2014. The findings reveal that most of the factors of entrepreneurial diversity (gender, skill, and experience) have a positive impact on the performance of these companies, while ethnic differences have no impact. We highlight that the members of the entrepreneurial team must prioritize cognitive conflicts that contribute to good skills development and to the valuing of the experiences necessary to make good strategic decisions. However, teams also need to put in place effective systems for managing emotional conflicts, as these negatively affect the relationship between diversity and performance.