Teaming Up Hinders Moving Up: Team Interactions and Social Mobility

This document examines how social skills and team interactions shape intergenerational mobility. Using Colombian administrative data linked to occupational skill requirements, we document that academic majors associated with higher social-skill demands exhibit systematically lower social mobility. A one standard deviation increase in social-skill requirements corresponds to a 0.046-point increase in the intergenerational income persistence coefficient. We implement lab-in-the-field experiments with 604 undergraduate students, randomly varying team socioeconomic composition and the information participants observe about teammates’ backgrounds. Low-income participants receive significantly lower leadership recognition in mixed-income teams when signals of socioeconomic status (such as high school affiliation or names) are revealed, despite comparable task performance. These gaps emerge in both peer nominations and self-assessments and are accompanied by reduced perceptions of teamwork quality and individual contributions. Our findings suggest that team-based environments may amplify inequality through social evaluation mechanisms rather than productive complementarities, providing a micro-level explanation for the lower mobility observed in socially intensive occupations and highlighting the importance of early social integration policies.