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The purpose of this paper is to answer the following question: how should start‐ups be staffed and how should they manage issues of team diversity?

The paper approaches diverse entrepreneurial teams in terms of three meaningful types, each with different assumptions, thus suggesting that their effects are complex.

The article concludes that entrepreneurs need to consider three key dimensions of diversity and form teams that are: moderate in diversity of opinions; high in diversity of expertise; and low in diversity of power.

The paper offers a set of practical recommendations to entrepreneurs, outlining how they can compose their teams and manage different dimensions of diversity; and to venture capitalists, suggesting how to assess team diversity as a critical factor in entrepreneurial teams.

Literature is unanimous about the effects of functional diversity in new product development teams. This paper uses simulation modeling to investigate the contradictory and dynamic effects of functional team diversity on innovation revealed by empirical literature. This paper aims to start a discussion on this dynamic perspective of team diversity.

This paper presents a systemic approach toward investigating the contradictory and dynamic effects of functional team diversity on innovation by creating a simplified System Dynamics model of functional diversity in new product development teams.

Although the simulation model is highly simplified, it can integrate the contradictory results of empirical data and the dynamic component of teamwork. Therefore, it offers a new approach to investigating the effects of functional diversity on team innovation.

The model is highly simplified and exemplary. No actual data are included, thus limiting the results as fully theoretical.

Empirical studies often analyze the effects of functional diversity on innovation in new product development teams. However, empirical data are unclear regarding the nature of the effects of functional diversity on innovation. Therefore, functional diversity is chosen for the simulation model as being the most controversially discussed diversity attribute. By applying a simulation model to the problem and adding a dynamic component to teamwork, we are contributing to the explanation for the contradictory findings in literature.

This study aims to explore the effects of expertise diversity on project efficiency and creativity in health-care project teams.

This study analyzes hierarchical linear models using multi-source data from 50 project teams in a large health-care organization in the USA. This data set includes self-reported survey responses from 274 team members and human resource information for all 515 members across the 50 teams. Expertise diversity is operationalized by professional diversity and positional diversity reflecting two dimensions, domain and level, of the concept of expertise.

This study reveals that professional diversity is negatively related to project efficiency and project creativity, whereas positional diversity is positively related to project efficiency.

Successfully managing a project team of experts within a limited time frame is a challenge for organizations. This study advances the understanding of the double-edged sword effect of expertise diversity on project teams, focusing on professional and positional diversity. It provides important insights for human resource development in terms of the composition of project teams regarding members’ expertise.

The popular press often touts workforce demographic diversity as profit enhancing because it may reduce the firm's communication costs with particular segments of customers or yield greater team problem-solving abilities. On the other hand, diversity also may raise communication costs within teams, thereby retarding problem solving and lowering productivity. Unfortunately, there is little empirical research that disentangles the above countervailing effects. Diversity in ability enhances the team productivity if there is significant mutual learning and collaboration within the team, while demographic diversity may harm productivity by making learning and peer pressure less effective and increasing team-member turnover. We evaluate these propositions using a novel panel data from a garment plant that shifted from individual piece rate to group piece rate production over three years. Because we observe individual productivity data, we are able to econometrically distinguish between the impacts of diversity in worker abilities and demographic diversity. Teams with more heterogeneous worker abilities are more productive at the plant. Holding the distribution of team ability constant, teams composed of only one ethnicity (Hispanic workers in our case) are more productive, but this finding does not hold for marginal changes in team composition. We find little evidence that workers prefer to be segregated; demographically diverse teams are no more likely to dissolve, holding team productivity (and hence pay) constant, than homogeneous teams.

Although some researchers have recognized that context can play an important role in explaining the mixed findings of past diversity research, to date a comprehensive framework for specifying these contextual influences has been lacking. In order to address this gap, we propose a framework for future research that incorporates contextual variables at extra-organizational, organizational, and team levels. We consider how these various aspects of diversity influence categorization-based or elaboration-based diversity outcomes. We also present findings of a literature review that identifies aspects of diversity context that have received attention directly or indirectly in research conducted between 1999 and 2007.

Several comprehensive reviews are united in drawing the conclusion that the cumulative research evidence on work team diversity is equivocal. Rather than review the extant state of diversity research, in this paper we redirect attention to the context of workplace diversity as a possible explanation for these mixed findings. We discuss how diversity context may be conceptualized, specify various aspects of this context at multiple levels of analysis, and consider how contextual variables can shape the outcomes of work team diversity. We present findings from a literature review (1999–2006) to identify key trends and patterns of results reported in recent research as well as contextual factors that have received attention to date. This paper also considers how the non-significant, positive, negative, and curvilinear effects of diversity reported in studies can be explained by the contextual factors outlined. Implications for future research are also discussed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Creativity is a strongly context related, collective and collaborative task across multiple boundaries that are of immaterial and material nature. Numerous factors play a role in the emergence of creativity. Leadership styles and diversity have undoubtedly an impact on team creativity. Creative teams face many processes inherent paradoxes which leaders and members need to balance and overcome together. According to the observations and research findings discussed in this chapter, effective management of diversity for creativity requires a ‘humble leadership’ style as well as different communication competencies and strategies. This book chapter provides theoretical and practical insights for those responsible for diversity management in creative teams, based on two empirical studies conducted between 2019 and 2022. Competencies and strategies are presented that may help leaders and teams navigate through highly dynamic, paradoxical interaction processes and, thus, turn their diversity into a creativity asset. In addition, a glimpse of the Team Creativity Navigator (TCN) is offered, which is a new assessment and development tool that supports leaders’ and team members’ learning processes for inclusive, creativity enhancing collaboration. As such, our chapter is an empirically based conceptual contribution with the objective of providing practitioners (and researchers) with insights into appropriate strategies to boost creativity in diverse teams.

Although cross-cultural research tends to compare deeply held values across nations, different cultures can exist within nations, as evidenced by clashes of cultures in Israel, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. We refer to multicultural teams (MCTs) to reflect our interest in team dynamics involving people from varying cultures (which may or may not include people of different nationalities). MCTs are likely to be characterized by “cultural value diversity,” or varying cultural values among members, and we present data in support of the hypothesis that MCT performance is influenced more significantly by cultural value diversity than by the aggregated level of any particular cultural value or demographic diversity within the teams.

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.