Abstract:

Over the past decades, team demographic diversity has become a topic of considerable interest to industrial and organizational psychology scholars and organizational managers. However, there is little consistent evidence regarding the relations between team demographic diversity and team performance. There are at least two potential reasons to explain these inconsistencies. First, there are different forms of team demographic diversity and the specific type of diversity should have different effects on team performance. For example, team demographic diversity can be categorized as separation, variety and disparity based on the statistical distribution of team members' characteristics. Second, past researchers suggest considering contextual issues in team demographic diversity research. Rather than test the direct relationship between team demographic diversity and team performance, they have pointed out that contextual factors (e.g., cultural context) should play an important moderating role in the relationship between team demographic diversity and team performance.

Our results showed that different demographic diversity had distinct effects on team performance, depending on the specific diversity type and context (e.g., performance types, culture and team types). However, many researchers rarely distinguish between different types of demographic diversity. Thus, we suggest that future studies should pay more attention on this issue by specifying the demographic diversity types. Further, teams in Eastern countries should increase diversity as variety to improve their performance, whereas teams in Western countries should not only pay attention to team demographic variety, but also need to decrease team demographic disparity to avoid its negative effects on team performance. Overall, our findings have specific implications for companies to improve their performance through team demographic diversity management.

Key words: team diversity, separation, variety, disparity, performance