Diversity in online self-organizing teams: longitudinal evidence from an open innovation community
ISSN: 0025-1747
Article publication date: 28 November 2023
Issue publication date: 22 January 2024
Abstract
Purpose
The development of information technologies has fueled the emergence of online self-organizing teams that involve members with diverse backgrounds to work on a shared goal voluntarily. However, the differences in members' attributes give rise to diversity. Therefore, the authors’ research is to figure out how diversity affects team performance in the context of online self-organizing teams and how this effect changes over team tenure.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors use a dynamic approach to the diversity-team performance relationship and collect a publicly longitudinal dataset on 3,970 collaborative items from 2,550 online self-organizing teams spanning nine years in an open innovation community of an online game.
Findings
The empirical results show that culture separation is negatively related to team performance, and this negative relationship weakens as team tenure increases. While skill variety and contribution disparity are positively related to team performance, and these positive relationships strengthen as team tenure increases.
Originality/value
The study provides a research framework to examine the relationship between diversity and team performance and explore how this relationship varies over team tenure in the context of online self-organizing teams. The results not only demonstrate the double-edged role of diversity in affecting the success of online self-organizing teams but also advance the understanding on the temporal effect of diversity on team performance.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work was partially supported by a grant from the National Nature Science Foundation of China (No. 71810107003) and National Social Science Foundation of China (No. 18ZDA109). This work was also supported by the Research Center of Enterprise Decision Support, Key Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences in Universities of Hubei Province at Wuhan Textile University.
Since submission of this article, the following author(s) have updated their affiliation(s): Jifeng Ma is at the School of Management, Wuhan Textile University, Wuhan, China and Research Institute of Management and Economics, Wuhan Textile University, Wuhan, China and Ran Li is at the Department of Decisions, Operations, and Technology of CUHK Business School, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
Citation
Ma, J., Lu, Y., Gong, Y. and Li, R. (2024), "Diversity in online self-organizing teams: longitudinal evidence from an open innovation community", Management Decision, Vol. 62 No. 1, pp. 219-239. https://doi.org/10.1108/MD-09-2022-1182
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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