How Does Diversity Affect Team Cognitive Processes? Understanding the Cognitive Pathways Underlying the Diversity Dividend in Teams

Abstract

The diversity literature has long proposed that diversity benefits team performance because the broader range of information, knowledge, and perspectives that members with different attributes bring to their teams enhances the cognitive processes through which teams perform their tasks. This paper reviews the empirical research based in this argument to identify what we know about the effects of diversity on team cognitive processes and identify directions for future research. We first differentiate the effects of diversity that operate through differences in cognitive resources from those that operate through differences in cognitive structures, both of which may derive from diversity in the same attributes. Then, basing our analysis in the view of teams as information processors, we review the findings of research on how diversity affects cognitive processes associated with the two major aspects of information processing – information surfacing and information combination – through which teams perform their tasks. Based on the review, we point to consistent themes, areas in need of clarification, research gaps, and avenues for future research, particularly focusing on improving the specification of theoretical mechanisms, focusing examinations of contingency effects and attending to boundary conditions, and increasing research on how demographic diversity affects team cognitive processes.