MGMT1003 Chap.8 Diversity, Teams and Team Creativity
Diversity, Teams and Team Creativity
Diversity has a timeline
Diverse groups pay costs first, more conflict and slower communication, and collect benefits later, better decisions and more creative ideas. Living abroad, rather than travelling, is linked to creativity through openness to experience.
From groups to creative teams
Teams make goals, roles, rules and coordination explicit, and cohesion helps only when norms favour performance.
Team creativity comes from combining what members share, so equal participation and psychological safety are performance variables, not courtesies.
How this chapter is examined
Items often test the order of costs and benefits, the difference between creativity and innovation, and the four team attributes.
Applied questions describe a team that is cohesive but unproductive, or diverse but quarrelsome, and ask what to do. Diagnose with the right concept, such as a low-effort norm or early-phase friction, then prescribe norms like psychological safety and equal participation.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Costs and benefits of group diversity
- 02
Multicultural experience and creativity
- 03
The difference between a group and a team
- 04
Positive synergy and team cohesiveness
- 05
Four norms worth establishing early
- 06
Team creativity versus team innovation
- 07
Collective information processing and equal participation
Worked example · free
Explain why a diverse team should not be disbanded early
- 1Conflict and slower communication are the expected early costs of diversity, so the friction is normal rather than a sign of failure.
- 1The benefits, a wider pool of information and better decisions on complex, novel problems, arrive later, and a team disbanded now never collects them.
- 1Keep the team, budget for the friction and build psychological safety and equal participation so differences are combined rather than suppressed.
Key terms
- Diversity
- How alike or unlike a group's members are in background, field, nationality or experience; it describes the group, not any one member.
- Positive Synergy
- Performance from coordinated team effort that exceeds the sum of the individual inputs.
- Team Cohesiveness
- How far members are attracted to a team and motivated to stay in it.
- Psychological Safety
- A team norm in which members feel comfortable being themselves, admitting mistakes and asking obvious questions.
- Team Innovation
- The development and implementation of novel, useful ideas by a team, ending with something in use.
- Team Creativity
- A team's development of ideas that are both novel and useful; it ends with the idea rather than its implementation.
Diversity, Teams and Team Creativity FAQ
Does living abroad really make people more creative?
The studies cited in the lecture link time spent living abroad, not travelling, with creativity. People asked to imagine living in a foreign country solved more creativity items than those imagining travel, a hometown day or a supermarket trip. The proposed mechanism is adaptation to another set of norms, which raises openness to experience.
What separates a team from a group?
Four things made explicit: a clear goal every member can state the same way, defined roles, rules stated openly rather than inferred, and coordinated rather than parallel work. A group may have them loosely; a team states them openly, and writing them down does most of the work.
Why does equal participation matter for team creativity?
Because creative ideas come from combining what members know. If one person or a pair dominates, there is little to combine and the output reflects one person's thinking. Woolley and colleagues found collective intelligence declined when a small group spoke all the time.
Can a cohesive team still perform badly?
Yes. Cohesion keeps members together and lifts morale, but it raises productivity only when the team's norms favour high performance. A tight-knit team that has settled into low effort will defend that standard. The fix is to change the norm, for example by setting clear goals and making contributions visible.
Exam move
Draw the cost and benefit timeline and the three-teams comparison from memory. Learn the four team attributes and four team norms as matched lists, and practise one answer that diagnoses a struggling diverse team and prescribes norms rather than a split. Finally, think of a team you have been in and identify which of the four norms was missing, and how its absence showed up in who spoke and who stayed quiet.
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