It's About the Process, Not the Product: A Meta-Analytic Investigation of the Relationships Between Team Demographic Diversity and Team Processes

Date
2019-12-04
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Abstract

The past half-century has been characterized by a rise in teamwork that has aligned with shifting demographic characteristics reflecting the world’s aging and increasingly diverse population. As a result, organizations and researchers alike have shifted their attention toward understanding the conditions under which team demographic diversity can facilitate or hinder team performance. In response to recent calls to examine the emergent processes and contextual factors impacting the team diversity-performance relationship, I conducted a meta-analytic investigation of the team diversity-process relationship that emphasizes the role of context in shaping these effects. This research contributes to the broader literature on team demographic diversity in several important ways. First, it integrates theory on team diversity through a framework emphasizing the roles of context, information elaboration, and social categorization to organize previous investigations of team processes. Second, it integrates research on gender, age, and racial diversity with research on nationality diversity, areas which have previously been studied separately. Third, it tests—and finds support for—the notion that team diversity may differentially impact team processes, indicating that the overall effect of team diversity on performance may be washed out by the differential effects of diversity on interpersonal and action processes. Finally, it provides a more updated state of the science of team demographic diversity, generating a number of clear directions for future inquiry.

Description
Degree
Master of Arts
Type
Thesis
Keywords
teamwork, diversity, meta-analysis
Citation

Traylor, Allison Marie. "It's About the Process, Not the Product: A Meta-Analytic Investigation of the Relationships Between Team Demographic Diversity and Team Processes." (2019) Master’s Thesis, Rice University. https://hdl.handle.net/1911/107759.

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