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This study aims to determine how cognitive diversity at the workplace influences team creativity. In this regard, the authors examined knowledge sharing and team-focused inclusion through which team members’ cognitive diversity was expected to elevate their positive work outcomes.

A quantitative method is used to accumulate the data. The authors surveyed workers and their respective managers at a single China-based food company. The supervisors rated the outcome variables (creativity and team effectiveness) regarding their employees, whereas employees were asked to rate the cognitive diversity, inclusion and knowledge sharing within the workgroup. The final valid sample size (n = 391) consisted of 137 workgroups with an adequate response rate (62.3%).

Cognitive diversity is related to team effectiveness but not creativity. The research found that cognitive diversity can increase creativity only through enhanced inclusion and knowledge sharing. Inclusion, likewise, explained the impact of cognitive diversity on effectiveness.

The originality of the current research lies in its contemporary exploration of inclusion and cognitive diversity and their pathways to team creativity and effectiveness. The social capital theory was applied to explain the proposed relationships.

This paper aims to identify the mechanisms through which cognitive diversity affects creativity. It explores how and in what ways cognitive diversity affects team members by examining the mediating roles of team learning and inclusion.

Questionnaire survey data were collected from matched supervisor and employee pairs from a direct sales company in the health-care industry in China. The final sample consisted of 216 employees from 48 teams, with a response rate of 90 per cent. Each employee’s immediate supervisor rated his or her creativity and in-role performance.

The empirical results indicate that team learning and inclusion mediate the effect of cognitive diversity on creativity.

This study was conducted in a single organisation in China and used subjective self-reported measures.

The results suggest that diversity training reduces the negative consequences of team diversity and offer practical insights into the effectiveness of diversity management and the ways to create a diverse and inclusive workplace. The study should help human resource professionals to identify human resources strategies that stimulate an inclusive environment and leverage the benefits associated with higher levels of diversity.

The findings have significant implications for developing and maintaining social harmony.

The uniqueness of this study is its simultaneous investigation of diversity and inclusion and how they lead to creativity.

The purpose of this paper is to extend current discussion on the drivers of innovative work behavior (IWB) by exploring how individual perceived diversities (visible dissimilarity and cognitive group diversity) and climates (team/clan and innovative/entrepreneurial) impact IWB.

Data had been collected from a cross-national study of working professionals (n = 584) from five different cultural contexts.

Findings of this study indicated that cognitive group diversity mediated the negative relationship between visible dissimilarity and IWB. Further, both innovative/entrepreneurial and team/clan climates moderated the relationship between visible dissimilarity and cognitive group diversity. Such a moderation effect reduced the negative effect that visible dissimilarity had on IWB.

A cross-sectional single-source data set.

From a managerial perspective, climates (team/clan and innovative/entrepreneurial) are central for IWB in the diverse (visible and cognitive) working environment. Thus, organizations should pay attention to create a climate (team/clan or/and innovative/entrepreneurial) that reduces the negative impact of perceived diversity in the working environment while supporting IWB.

This study is the first of its kind that is based on social categorization theory, empirically examining how different types of diversity (visible dissimilarity and cognitive group diversity) simultaneously reduce individuals’ IWB. Furthermore, this paper provides insights that climates (team/clan and innovative/entrepreneurial) are crucial for IWB in the diverse working environment.

This study aims to examine the role of knowledge sharing as a mediating variable on the effect of cognitive diversity on team innovation. Additionally, the study also tests the role of a moderating variable team climate on the relationship between cognitive diversity and knowledge sharing.

The study used an explanatory approach to test the hypothesis. A survey with structured questionnaires was distributed to 39 creative teams between radio and television broadcasting institutions in the Province of Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

The current study shows cognitive diversity has a significant association with knowledge sharing, and knowledge sharing positively associated with team innovation. The findings of this study indicate that team climate moderates the relationship between cognitive diversity and knowledge sharing. Additionally, knowledge sharing is found not to be a significant mediation on the relationship between cognitive diversity and team innovation.

The study promises to examine how diverse teams work particularly in the context of creative teams in radio and television broadcasting institutions. However, this study only focuses on relationships; it does not examine the processes underlying those relationships. This study implies for future research agenda focusing on the mechanism affecting the relationships. Additionally, examining the relationship model in the context of a less-creative team such as banking industry could also a call for future research.

The results of the study contribute to managerial implications which suggest that to enhance team innovation, a team leader must design a comfortable working climate that stimulates productive knowledge sharing.

The study provides a comprehensive understanding of knowledge sharing and team climate on the relationship between cognitive diversity and team innovation, which are missing in previous empirical studies. Then, the study is relevant because of inconclusive findings from past studies examining the relationship between cognitive diversity and team innovation.

This paper aims to investigate the influence of cognitive style diversity on intra-group relationship conflict and individual-level organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs). The role of leader-member exchange as a moderating variable is also examined.

The authors used hierarchical linear modeling and hierarchical regression analysis to analyze results from a sample of 344 members from 83 teams nested within 126 departments in six manufacturing organizations in the People’s Republic of China.

Results yielded general support for our hypothesized relationships between cognitive style diversity and intra-group relationship conflict. Leader-member exchange was also found to moderate the relationship between these two variables. Contrary to expectations, there were no relationships between these variables and individual-level organizational citizenship behaviors.

This research addresses calls from the team diversity and conflict literature to address the understudied area of deep-level cognitive diversity. Second, this study addresses previous calls for more team-level and mixed-level theory and methodology to inform OCB research. Third, this is the first study of group-level cognitive style diversity and the moderating influence of leader-member-exchange and provides valuable insights into ways of mitigating some of the negative effects of cognitive diversity on teams.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of cognitive diversity and structural empowerment on strategic flexibility in the context of business performance.

Structural equation modeling (SEM) is used to statistically test the data that were collected from health-care organizations located in the USA.

SEM reveals the positive main effect of cognitive diversity on strategic flexibility, the moderating effect of structural empowerment on the effect of cognitive diversity on strategic flexibility and performance and the mediating effect of strategic flexibility on the joint effect of cognitive diversity and structural empowerment on business performance.

The study reveals that diversity in cognitive resources and workplace empowerment can jointly support business performance via strategic flexibility. The paper explains that this positive effect can take place because the two factors jointly enable business organizations to find better internal applications for new relevant information, thus allowing firms to quickly reorganize their internal resources in a way that leads to better performance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of the process of strategic planning on cohesiveness and performance in cognitively diverse units.

This study uses structural equation modeling (SEM) to analyze an original dataset collected from employees working in healthcare organizations in the United Sates.

This study finds the negative effects of cognitive differences among employees on a unit's cohesiveness and performance and the positive moderating effects of the process of strategic planning on such relationships. Consequently, revealing the cohesiveness enhancing function of the process of strategic planning.

The study contributes to past research by revealing that business organizations could use the process of strategic planning to enhance their internal cohesiveness, in turn improving their business performance. This study explains that when the process of planning clearly defines an organization's mission, goals and implementation plans, employees working in highly diverse units will be more likely to better understand, accept and in turn also support their organization as a whole and its critical strategic goals. This should increase internal cohesiveness and lead leading to better performance.

This paper examines how groups respond to diversity. Specifically, a framework is developed that integrates prior research on diversity in groups within a learning perspective. The value of the framework is that it seeks to integrate various dimensions of group diversity with the intent of highlighting critical characteristics of groups that effectively manage diverse member contributions. Within this framework, the focus is on cognitive rather than demographic diversity and on how groups use diverse ideas and approaches to learn collectively. Based on this framework, it is suggested that groups manage cognitive diversity in three distinct ways, through accommodation, elaboration and transformation. These responses to diversity may represent different levels of group learning along a continuum ranging from routine, exploitative to non‐routine, exploratory learning. An exploratory study is presented in which this framework is used to understand how groups manage cognitive diversity. Preliminary study results suggest that most groups seem to respond to diversity by accommodating or elaborating while very few groups seem to engage in transformation. Specifically, few groups seem to invest the necessary resources to capitalize on diversity and create opportunities for non‐routine learning. Implications for practice and research are discussed.

This study aims to develop a theoretical integrated model examining the role of the co-occurrence of task and relationship conflict (CTRC) as a mediator in the relationship between diversity and group effectiveness. The model also examines transformational leadership (TFL) as a moderator in this relationship.

Data were collected using a questionnaire survey from 354 faculty in 56 workgroups from three private universities in the Middle East. SEM and hierarchical regression analysis were used to test the suitability of the model and its hypotheses.

The results revealed that TFL moderated diversity's direct effect on CTRC as well as the indirect effect linking diversity, CTRC, and group effectiveness. Specifically, diversity had an inverted U-shaped relationship with CTRC in groups with low TFL, but a negative linear relationship in those with high TFL.

The findings expand understanding of how, and under what conditions, diversity influences group effectiveness by: offering a fresh treatment of this relationship, introducing CTRC as a bivariate construct and bringing into focus the centrality of its harmful effect on this association, and highlighting the influence of TFL in ameliorating this harmful effect.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of cognitive diversity on strategic issue interpretation among the boards of directors making sense of sustainability management. The study also investigated the centrality of the corporate sustainability issues to identify common interpretative patterns in the shared cognitive maps among the companies. In addition, the aim was to advance quantitative methods for the analysis of decision-makers’ cognition.

The research was an exploratory study analyzing 43 individual cognitive maps collected through surveys from the boards of nine cleantech companies. For the elicitation of the cognitive maps, the study used the hybrid cognitive mapping technique. The diversity of the shared cognitive maps was analyzed using the distance ratio formula and the graph analysis method with eigenvector to measure the centrality of the strategic issue interpretation in the maps.

This study provides evidence through the analysis of distance ratios on the existence of cognitive diversity among companies within the same industry. Surprisingly, despite the cognitive diversity, the study identified strong common patterns on strategic issue interpretations among the companies. In addition, the study shows that the sustainability management issues have gained minor attention from the boards of directors.

The initial industry sample provided relatively restricted perspectives on managerial cognition, and to confirm the findings regarding the effects of industry on the shared cognitive maps of top decision-makers, wider industry-level data are needed.

This study provides an approach to facilitate the process of strategic decision-making for top decision-makers by identifying the shared beliefs of the selected strategic theme and to concentrate on the most central strategic issues in the company and industry. It reveals asymmetry between the significance of sustainability issues in an open agenda and the real position of sustainability concepts in the shared cognitive maps in the green industry. Also, the study advances cognitive mapping techniques for application in the board’s decision-making.

This paper contributes to brightening the black box of corporate governance by shedding light on the interaction of the concepts of corporate sustainability and other key strategic issues within the shared cognitive maps of the boards. It also provides new empirical knowledge on top decision-making processes and the effects of cognitive diversity on the strategic issue interpretations within the corporate boards of the green industry, and it further develops the methodology for the quantification of cognitive diversity and the content of cognitive maps.