Cognitive Diversity and Team Performance: The Roles of Team Mental Models and Information Processing (original) (raw)
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We thank Barbara Lawrence for her consistently helpful editorial guidance. We also thank three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, and Dennis Gioia for his assistance with a previous draft. 2 THE RECIPROCAL EFFECTS OF TOP MANAGEMENT TEAM COGNITIVE DIVERSITY AND FIRM PERFORMANCE: OPENING THE BLACK BOX Demography research rarely examines the black box within which the cognitive diversity of the top management team is assumed to affect firm performance. Using data from 35 simulated firms run by a total of 159 managers attending executive education programs, the current research tested several hypotheses concerned with: a) the relationship between demographic and cognitive team diversity; and b) reciprocal influence processes between team cognitive diversity and firm performance. Results showed that members of high-performing teams tended to preserve multiple interpretations early in the team's life cycle, but moved toward greater clarity near the end of the life cycle. These high-performing teams, therefore, exhibited both early interpretative ambiguity and late heedful interrelating. Further, teams that improved firm performance early in the game tended to show increased diversity concerning perceptions of team decision making and structure over the course of the simulation. Thus, cognitive diversity in teams both affected and was affected by changes in firm performance. Finally, there was a marginally significant tendency for teams heterogenous in terms of nationality and functional background to show increases in market share over the course of the simulation. Surprisingly, there was no evidence of any effect of demographic diversity on measures of cognitive diversity. Commenting at the fifth game of the National Basketball Association (NBA) championship series in Seattle, basketball legend, Julius Erving, remarked that the 1996 Chicago Bulls offered a glimpse of what the team of the future would look like: the 1996 Chicago Bulls were one of the most nationally and ethnically diverse teams ever assembled in the NBA. The Bulls' lineup consisted of the best white and African American players from three continents: Europe, Australia, and America. 3 The increasing diversity of teams in the NBA is only one instance of a larger trend. The work force throughout the developed world is becoming more diverse, reflecting changing demographics within nation states (Johnston and Packer 1987) and migrations of peoples across national borders (Hambrick, Korn, Fredrickson and Ferry 1989, p. 33). The growing diversity of the workforce underscores three questions of theoretical and practical importance concerning the makeup and functioning of teams in organizations. First, how does team demographic diversity affect cognitive diversity? Second, what are the effects of team cognitive diversity on performance? Third, is there a reciprocal effect of team performance on team cognitive diversity? We explored these questions in a simulation of top management team decision making. LITERATURE REVIEW The victory of the Chicago Bulls in the NBA championships notwithstanding, the relationship between team diversity and outcomes remains unclear. Researchers have pointed to both the costs and benefits of increased diversity in teams. Top management team demographic diversity has been shown to predict turnover rates (Jackson, Brett, Sessa, Cooper, Julin and Peyronnin 1991, Wiersema and Bird 1993); increased levels of work group diversity have been associated with lower psychological attachment to the organization (Tsui, Egan and O'Reilly 1992) and less frequent communication (Zenger and Lawrence 1989). But diversity has also been hailed as a competitive advantage because minority views "can stimulate consideration of non-obvious alternatives in task groups" (Cox and Blake 1991, p. 50); and heterogenous teams have been shown to be more creative than homogenous teams (Triandis, Hall and Ewen 1965, Hambrick, Cho and Chen 1996). The discrepancy in the research literature concerning the effects of team diversity on organizational functioning reflects two different approaches. The demographic approach studies 4 diversity in terms of gender, age, organizational tenure, ethnicity and nationality (see Pfeffer 1983, for a review). The emphasis is on directly measurable attributes of individuals. The cognitive approach studies diversity in terms of attitudinal and normative differences between individuals who may be homogenous on demographic indicators (e.g., Nemeth 1986). Thus, cognitive diversity in this literature refers to variability concerning relatively unobservable attributes such as attitudes, values and beliefs.
The Academy of Management Annals, 2016
The existing literature on diverse teams suggests that diversity is both helpful to teams in making more information available and encouraging creativity and damaging to teams in reducing cohesion and information sharing. Thus the extant literature suggests that diversity within teams is a double-edged sword that leads to both positive and negative effects simultaneously. This literature has not, however, fully embraced the increasing calls in the broader groups literature to take account of time in understanding how groups function (e.g., Cronin, Weingart, & Todorova, 2011). We review the literature on diverse teams employing this lens to develop a dynamic perspective that takes account of the timing and flow of diversity's effects. Our review suggests that diversity in groups has different short-term and long-term effects in ways that are not fully captured by the dominant double-edged sword metaphor. We identify an emerging perspective that suggests a tropical depression metaphor-that has the potential, over time, to develop either into a dangerous hurricane or diffuse into a rainstorm that gives way to sunshine, as more apt to capture the dynamic effects of diversity in teams. We conclude by outlining an agenda for redirecting future research on diverse teams using this more dynamic perspective.
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Intra-team diversity has contradictory effects, both improving information and hindering social integration, resulting in a neutral average effect on team performance. Combining those effects differently allows the prediction of a U-shaped relationship of diversity to performance variability, improving on past prediction of a simple increase. The reanalysis of a field study of 35 teams in a business simulation confirms such effect for three demographic and two cognitive diversity variables. An analysis combining both mean and variability effects leads to improved predictions, and the conclusions regarding the effect of age diversity drawn from a conventional mean analysis even reverse if aiming for an extreme performance goal.
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Diversity does not only bring positive consequences. It has often been recognized that heterogeneity in teams can reduce intra-group cohesiveness, and that it can lead to conflicts and misunderstandings which, in turn, can lower employee satisfaction, citizenship behaviors and increase turnover. On the other hand, there is also evidence for performance-increasing effects of diversity because it can improve creativity and innovation through the team members' greater variety of perspectives. Little is known, however, about the conditions and the psychological mechanisms required for increasing group performance under diverse settings. Answers to research questions such as how and when diversity influences performance at work are still limited. The purpose of the paper is to provide theoretical answers to these questions by proposing a model of managing diversity which draws on social psychology theories. The model brings a new perspective by identifying the process of learning from one another's identity within a group. This process underlies two different levels of mechanisms (individual and group level). The model proposes that when these social psychological mechanisms are activated, diversity will lead to an increase in group performance. The model also suggests that collective identity is salient and when psychological safety climate are the psychological conditions that activate these mechanisms. Published by Elsevier Inc.
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A metatheoretical framework of diversity in teams
In the last 22 years, research on diversity in teams has been propelled by information processing and social categorization theories, and more recently, by theories of disparity/ (in)justice and access to external networks. These theories stress different diversity processes, treating team diversity respectively as variety of information, as separation, as disparity, and as variety of access. We appraise this literature by identifying major problems in the way these four foundational theories are used either alone or in combination, arguing that the related theoretical models are inherently incomplete and static. In an attempt to resolve these problems, we introduce a metatheoretical framework that relates these four foundational theories according to the metadimensions of group boundary and diversity mindset. We also propose a metatheoretical model that identifies interactions among the four diversity processes and specifies diversity response patterns to team success or failure over time. Our metatheoretical approach resolves significant omissions in the literature and penetrates into the dynamic nature of team diversity in more complex, temporally sensitive and synthetic ways.
We examine the process and performance effects of two different forms of functio nal diversity in management teams -the predominant conceptualization in the literature ( dominan tfunction diversity) and a second conceptualization that has been generally overlooked ( intra-person alfunctional diversity). In a sample of business unit management teams, dominant function div ersity had a negative and intra-personal functional diversity a positive effect on information sharing and unit performance. These findings suggest that different forms of functional diversity can have ver y different implications for team process and performance and that intra-personal functional diversity ma tters for team effectiveness.
Journal of Management, 2011
The authors revisited the demographic diversity variable and team performance relationship using meta-analysis and took a significant departure from previous meta-analyses by focusing on specific demographic variables (e.g., functional background, organizational tenure) rather than broad categories (e.g., highly job related, less job related). They integrated different conceptualizations of diversity (i.e., separation, variety, disparity) into the development of their rationale and hypotheses for specific demographic diversity variable-team performance relationships. Furthermore, they contrasted diversity with the team mean on continuous demographic variables when elevated levels of a variable, as opposed to differences, were more logically related to team performance. Functional background variety diversity had a small positive relationship with general team performance as well as with team creativity and innovation. The relationship was strongest for design and product development teams. Educational background variety diversity was related to team creativity and innovation and to team performance for top management 709 Downloaded from 710 Journal of Management / May 2011 teams. Other variables generally thought to increase task-relevant knowledge (e.g., organizational tenure) and team performance were unrelated to team performance, although these variables were almost never studied as the variety conceptualization (i.e., the conceptualization that can reflect the breadth of knowledge that can be applied to the task). Team mean organizational tenure was related to team performance in terms of efficiency. Race and sex variety diversity had small negative relationships with team performance, whereas age diversity was unrelated to team performance regardless of diversity conceptualization. Implications for staffing teams and future research are discussed.