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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.

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.

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 test a model in which diversity in goal orientation is associated with decreased team performance by virtue of reduced group information elaboration. In addition, the model considers the moderating role of internal team environment.

The paper takes the form of an empirical research in which the hypothesized relationships are investigated using hierarchical multiple‐regression analyses.

The findings show that teams high in diversity in goal orientation report lower levels of performance because of the lower group information elaboration. However, in the presence of a supportive team environment the negative relationship of diversity in goal orientation on group information elaboration are reduced.

The paper is based on a cross‐sectional design.

The paper suggests management should consider goal orientation in team building, and provide interventions to improve team environment.

Diversity has relevant consequences on interpersonal relations, decision‐making processes, and team performance. The results of the present study suggest ways in which teams might leverage the benefits of diversity and reduce coordination problems associated with it.

This study contributes to the diversity team literature by expanding Nederveen‐Pieterse and colleagues' research on diversity in goal orientation by emphasizing the role of internal team environment as moderator in the relationship between diversity in goal orientation and group information elaboration.

The purpose of this paper is to extend earlier findings suggesting that affective diversity is always negative for group performance, by examining its influence on managerial decision performance in a more controlled environment.

In an attempt to mitigate some of the many methodological challenges associated with studies in “real-word” contexts, the authors chose to adopt a quasi-experimental research design involving teams of master of business administration students engaged in managerial decision making. This research design is consistent with previous research conducted in the area of affect and individual or group-level outcomes.

The results indicate that both positive and negative affective diversity are positively associated with managerial decision performance, although only the relationship with negative affective diversity is significant. Overall, these findings support the idea that affective diversity may constitute a strength in the context of managerial decision making. These results contrast with the findings of previous studies.

Further quantitative and qualitative investigation is recommended in order to clarify the contradictory results between the current study and previous research. Specifically, this investigation might concern the effect of contingency factors such as type of team (i.e. ad hoc vs long term), type of task and team-level self-regulation ability.

Since the seminal work of Barsade et al. (2000), no further studies have attempted to resolve some of the empirical questions emerging from preliminary research on affective diversity. The paper thus provides new insights into the effects of affective diversity.

While diversification within organisations is seen by many to be a strategic move, there is conflicting evidence about what makes diverse teams successful. The purpose of this paper is to highlight a range of complex, and in some cases contradictory, research contributions towards several key areas of diversity within teams, and to propose a framework for integrating existing approaches and clarifying inconsistencies in this domain.

A literature review was conducted to explore several key areas of surface and deep-level diversity in teams, with the discussion included in this paper highlighting many of the inconsistencies and complexities associated with this research domain.

This review highlights the need for future research to look at the effects of surface and deep-level diversity simultaneously, over time, across multiple levels and with a broad range of contextual moderators, to examine their impact on a range of outcomes.

In order to account for the complexities within diversity research, the authors propose the use of the job demands-resources (JDR) model which suggests possible explanations for inconsistent findings and bridges the gap between commonly used theoretical perspectives.

The purpose of this paper is to explicate the influence of diverse team on team-level ambidexterity and its curvilinear assessment, and test the mediating role of team reflexivity and the moderating role of shared meta-knowledge in the curvilinear relationship between team diversity and team ambidexterity.

The authors collected multisource and temporally separated data on 206 R&D teams within 28 high-tech firms in Taiwan.

This study found a complex, curvilinear, moderated mediation relationship that functional background diversity has with team ambidexterity. Furthermore, consistent with the notion from categorization-elaboration model, the authors found the curvilinear relationship that functional background diversity has with both team ambidexterity and team reflexivity. Finally, the authors also found that the curvilinear relationship between functional background diversity and team reflexivity was moderated by shared meta-knowledge, such that the positive relationship was strengthened and the negative relationship weakened, in higher shared meta-knowledge in teams rather than lower.

The results demonstrate that team diversity-team ambidexterity relationship is much more complicated than previous works have assumed or suggested. Overall, the authors contribute to a novel understanding about the importance of team diversity in ambidextrous teams by opening the black box of how and when functional background diversity and team ambidexterity.

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.

Online medical teams (MTs), involving collaboration between remote healthcare workers, can provide comprehensive and rapid healthcare to patients. The growth in MTs is continuing, with popularity growing among doctors and patients, but some MTs disband, which could break the continuity of healthcare services provided. We aim to address this pressing issue by exploring the effects of team diversity and leadership types on team status (i.e. team disbandment (TD)). This paper systematically investigates the influences of team diversity, including separation, variety and disparity diversity and the effects of leadership types, including strong, equal and weak types.

A data set consisting 1,071 online MTs was collected from the Good Doctor website, a leading Chinese online health community (OHC), on January 10, 2018. The data captured included 206 teams which disbanded after 3 months collaboration. Logistic regression and maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) were used to examine their effects.

The results show that variety diversity, related to departments, positively affects TD, but disparity diversity, referring to clinician titles, negatively affects TD. Separation diversity, in terms of team member attitudes, exerts a negligible influence on disbandment. Although strong and equal leadership types negatively influence TD, they are seen to strengthen the positive effect of variety diversity, suggesting stable structure combinations of strong or equal-type leadership and low department diversity, as well as the match of weak-type leadership and high department diversity.

This paper extends the current understanding of virtual teams and OHCs by examining the role of leadership types and team diversity, and their influencing role on team status. The pairwise combinations are obtained to effectively reduce the disbandment probability of medical teams operating in OHCs, which could help platform managers, team founders and those connected with MTs deal with the team-disbandment crisis, providing both theoretical and practical implications to healthcare providers and researchers alike.