That depends on what you consider to be the main purpose of a sports team - winning matches or providing entertainment and selling tickets to their games.

My instinct is that cheerleaders don't improve results for sports teams, but that that also isn't their function.

On the original topic, I've actually encountered the situation of "environment filled with dude programmers with poor social skills suddenly gets a few very attractive ladies who have incentives to be nice to them." My frat went co-ed senior year.

To put things mildly, productivity did not improve.

On the other hand, a lot more guys wanted to join up. So my guess is that the office cheerleaders do not make existing programmers more productive (and may in fact do the opposite), but that they may make the office more desirable as a work environment to prospective hires.

They don't seem to be exactly cheerleaders. Their function seems to very similar to that of hostesses in nightclubs.

Possibly. It depends what you hire them to do. See "The Wolf of Wall Street" for an example of effective (in the short term) motivation.

The best response to that article that I've seen so far:

Sure, blue balls always help me code better

-- burgerissues on reddit

Related:

1. most people want to socialize with the opposite sex, and are unhappy (and hence unproductive) if they can’t;
2. the conscious reasons for wanting to socialize with the opposite sex often have nothing to do with “fluid exchange” (to use the John Nash character’s phrase from A Beautiful Mind),
3. let he (or she) who is without subconscious Darwinian motivations cast the first stone,
4. human beings didn’t evolve to live their lives in an 85%-male environment,
5. by the Pigeonhole Principle, not every straight male will be as lucky as I was to find a girlfriend in the remaining 15%, and
6. computer science departments could attract and retain better people of both sexes if they felt less like monasteries or pirate ships.

-- Scott Aaronson