The positive effects of team diversity on creativity and problem solving

Everyone has worked on a team at some point in their career, and we all have memories, both positive and negative, of those experiences. While the details of the projects we work on might fade, the experiences we have and the relationships we form tend to linger. Who we work with on a team has a profound impact on our feelings about that team, and research over the past few decades has shown that team makeup impacts team performance and organizational outcomes as well. Diversity within a team can have positive direct and indirect impacts on idea generation, goal attainment, and problem resolution. The relationship between team diversity and performance is a complex one, so let us take a deeper dive into this topic.

Hundreds of peer-reviewed journal articles and trade publications have discussed the topic of diversity and team performance over the years, and one of the most disputed aspects of this research is how diversity itself is defined. Teams can be diverse in the demographic backgrounds of the members, the level of experience, geographic location, educational background, or even personality types. Going back to 1998, Harrison et al probably defined it best by separating diversity into “surface-level” characteristics (e.g. age, race, and gender) and “deep-level” characteristics (e.g. attitudes, beliefs, and skills) that team members come to learn about over time. Deep-level diversity generally has a stronger impact on team performance than surface-level diversity, but teams high in surface-level diversity tend to be high in deep-level diversity as well. This means that forming teams based on surface-level characteristics will usually lead to the desired outcome of high deep-level diversity.