Game performance of immigrant NBA players might suffer due to anti-foreigner sentiment
Professional basketball has gone global. “[F]rom 2010 to 2021, 21 percent of [National Basketball Association (NBA)] players who debuted in the league were foreign-born. Over time, foreign-born NBA players have come from nearly every continent representing 80 countries, as well as U.S. Territories and the U.S. Virgin Islands.”
A new study looks at the impacts of anti-immigrant sentiment on the performance of NBA players who are immigrants. And the results are fascinating if not altogether surprising.
During the 2020–2021 season of the National Basketball Association, immigrant players for teams in regions with stronger far-right political sentiments were more likely to make game errors—highlighting the effects of such views on immigrant workplace performance. Benjamin Korman and Florian Kunze of the University of Konstanz, Germany, presented these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE. “Prior research has shown that, in regions with strong support for far-right political parties, immigrants face more prejudice and discrimination. Evidence also suggests that being exposed to anti-immigrant propaganda may hinder immigrants’ performance on various tasks, and exposure to negative stereotypes about a certain group of people might boost the performance of people outside that group.”
The new study hypothesized that living in areas with far-right views might increase immigrants’ awareness of the possibility of being judged negatively as immigrants, disrupting their attention and causing them to make more workplace errors. To investigate that hypothesis, they analyzed data on all 522 US-based NBA players’ game performance following the failed 2020 re-election bid of Donald Trump. The researchers found that immigrant players for teams based in regions with a higher percentage of presidential votes for Trump were more likely to make performance errors than immigrant players in regions with less Trump support. In contrast, the opposite was found for native players in the far-right regions. These results held true after statistically accounting for other factors that could impact performance, such as age, position, ball-possession time, number of possessions, salary and minutes of play time.
On the basis of their findings, the researchers suggest that organizations might consider steps to insulate employees from regional far-right views by, for instance, banning employees from wearing politically charged clothing and fostering inclusive environments.
KJ