Team Diversity and Information Use

Both types of diversity provided information-processing benefits that outweighed the limitations associated with social categorization processes and national diversity had curvilinear relationships with the range, depth, and integration of information use.

Abstract

Educational and national diversity are proposed to influence work teams' information use differently, with educational diversity mainly enhancing information use and national diversity invoking social categorization, thus hindering information use. As expected, increasing educational diversity positively influenced the range and depth of information use for all except the most diverse teams we studied, but negatively influenced information integration. In contrast to our expectations, national diversity had curvilinear relationships with the range, depth, and integration of information use. Both types of diversity provided information-processing benefits that outweighed the limitations associated with social categorization processes.