Does a Diverse Team Equal a Creative Team?

Diverse teams are widely employed by organizations to increase creativity and innovation through bringing in and stimulating novel combinations of heterogeneous information and knowledge. However, team diversity is sometimes associated with identity separation and conflict, which can interfere with diverse information processing and harm creativity, especially when diverse members form strong faultlines. Team faultlines refer to “hypothetical dividing lines that may split a group into subgroups based on one or more attributes” (Lau & Murnighan, 1998: 328). As illustrated in Table 1, two hypothetical teams have similar levels of diversity in function, gender, and age, but when these three attributes aligned, such as in Team 1, team members are more likely to be divided into subgroups of A and B versus C and D. Based on social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1986), in teams with strong faultlines, members are likely to identify more strongly with subgroups than with the whole team, and in-subgroup and out-subgroup dynamics may lead to more relationship conflicts and hinder necessary information elaboration for new idea generation. Therefore, a longstanding question in diverse team management is how to bridge identity divides and unleash innovation potential. 

Table 1. Two Teams with Similar Diversity but Different Faultline Strength 

What is new about team iungens practice (TIP)? 

Existing studies have identified several methods to manage faultlines, including cross-cutting membership to blur subgroup boundaries, redesigning task characteristics to strengthen interdependence, and developing transformative and inclusive leadership. Though these methods have been demonstrated with high effectiveness, membership changes involving adding, removing, or replacing members might be costly for some teams, and redesigning task characteristics might be unworkable for other teams. Inspired by the research on individuals’ tertius iungens orientation to connect, join, and unite people in one’s social network, we develop team iungens practice (TIP) as a new team process to describe teams’ collective actions in forging and strengthening connections and facilitating new coordination among team members. 

The enactors of TIPs can be team leaders as individuals or the team as a collective. The targets of TIPs are the members working in the same team rather than people within one’s social network. TIPs function in three ways to bridge subgroup identity separation and reconcile conflicts in teams. First, TIPs can create opportunities for all members to collaborate and strengthen their relationships. The contact hypothesis proposes that the more people have contact with one another, the more likely they are to reduce bias toward out-groups and foster positive relationships. Second, TIPs can highlight common ground shared by team members and downplay the differences in positions and opinions between subgroups, which has been found to be an effective strategy to mitigate the negative impact of social identity separation. Finally, engaging in TIPs can facilitate the development of collaborative team norms to address subgroup separation and conflict, which has been found to be an effective way to bridge across identity boundaries. 

We developed a psychometrically sound scale to measure TIPs and demonstrated its functions in mitigating the negative impact of demographic faultlines on team creativity through relationship conflict. Specifically, we recruited 313 employees from 62 teams across three companies: one state-owned and two private. Data collection took place at three time points. At time 1, team members and leaders reported their demographic characteristics, such as age, gender, education level, and organizational tenure. We used established methods to calculate faultline strength based on these four characteristics. Two months later, the same teams were invited to report team relationship conflicts that they had experienced in the last two months. At the same time, team members rated their leaders’ TIP, while leaders rated the team members’ TIP within the same period. Another two months later, team leaders were invited to report team creativity.  

Statistical analyses showed that even if teams have salient subgroups divided by strong demographic faultlines, team members or leaders can engage in TIPs to identify opportunities for collaboration within the team, forge connections between each other, include all members in making important team decisions, synthesize ideas and contributions from different members, or point out the common ground shared by members, etc., and through these behaviors, these teams are less likely to experience relationship conflicts, and on the contrary, they can value and integrate different information and knowledge from diverse members to strengthen team creativity. Moreover, these TIP behaviours can be employed to deal with relationship conflict when personal dislike and irritation are unavoidable. Our findings showed that team members, rather than leaders, could identify situations that need increased levels of TIPs and engage in such behaviours accordingly. For instance, when two subgroups are fighting for their ideas of a new product, and members even have personal attacks towards other subgroups, any member can take initiatives to remind all members to focus on the task rather than personal differences, and encourage synthesizing conflicting ideas to generate a better solution for the common goals. Thus, members can effectively manage conflicts among themselves, rather than appealing to leaders who may be absent or lack relevant information to resolve disputes. 

How can organizations adopt TIPs? 

Organizations can facilitate an inclusive organizational climate for diverse employees through encouraging TIPs across departments and work teams. For instance, policymakers can integrate these behaviours into the performance evaluation system and reward individual employees, teams, and departments that demonstrate high levels of engagement in these behaviours.  

The human resources department can design training programs for leaders and employees to help them understand the core ideas of TIPs and practice engaging in these behaviours across various scenarios. At the same time, successful cases of teams and departments that have employed TIPs to improve collective performance can be collected and promoted to within the organization. 

Team leaders and department heads can employ TIPs to manage connections and identity separation in strong faultline teams, and they can serve as role models for positive connections and collaborative processes among team members.