The Effects of Team Diversity on Team Outcomes: A Meta-Analytic Review of Team Demography
verifiedmedium profile · Journal of Management · 2007
Horwitz, Sujin K.; Horwitz, Irwin B.
How this was studied
A meta-analytic synthesis — it pools many primary studies rather than running a single design, so there is no single-study diagram.
What this article reports
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Models this article informs
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In the authors’ words
The article’s own abstract.
Over the past few decades, a great deal of research has been conducted to examine the complex relationship between team diversity and team outcomes. However, the impact of team diversity on team outcomes and moderating variables potentially affecting this relationship are still not fully answered with mixed findings in the literature. These research issues were, therefore, addressed by quantitatively reviewing extant work and provided estimates of the relationship between team diversity and team outcomes. In particular, the effects of task-related and bio-demographic diversity at the group-level were meta-analyzed to test the hypothesis of synergistic performance resulting from diverse employee teams. Support was found for the positive impact of task-related diversity on team performance although bio-demographic diversity was not significantly related to team performance. Similarly, no discernible effect of team diversity was found on social integration. The implications of the review for future research and practices are also discussed.
What the literature says about it
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supports “Early studies of diversity indicated that task-related diversity positively impacts team performance, while bio-demographic diversity either had a negative effect or no influence over team performance (Horwitz and Horwitz, 2007).”
supports “Overall, task-related diversity has been shown to have a small positive relationship with performance (see Webber and Donahue, 2001; Horwitz and Horwitz, 2007; Joshi and Roh, 2009; van Dijk et al., 2012; Bui et al., 2019).”
disputes “At the same time, non-work-related demographic diversity, such as race and gender, it often leads to negative outcomes like decreased group cohesion, increased conflict, and reduced performance [4,29–32].”
disputes “…diversity (i.e., demographic diversity considered as a unidimensional or composite variable) has been shown to have a weak negative to near zero relationship with performance (see Webber and Donahue, 2001; Stewart, 2006; Horwitz and Horwitz, 2007; Joshi and Roh, 2009; van Dijk et al., 2012).”
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