The interplay of diversity training and diversity beliefs on team creativity in nationality diverse teams

Attaining value from nationality diversity requires active diversity management, which organizations often employ in the form of diversity training programs. Interestingly, however, the previously reported effects of diversity training are often weak and, sometimes, even negative. This situation calls for research on the conditions under which diversity training helps or harms teams. We propose that diversity training can increase team creativity, but only for teams with less positive pretraining diversity beliefs (i.e., teams with a greater need for such training) and that are sufficiently diverse in nationality. Comparing the creativity of teams that attended nationality diversity training versus control training, we found that for teams with less positive diversity beliefs, diversity training increased creative performance when the team’s nationality diversity was high, but undermined creativity when the team’s nationality diversity was low. Diversity training had less impact on teams with more positive diversity beliefs, and training effects were not contingent upon these teams’ diversity. Speaking to the underlying process, we showed that these interactive effects were driven by the experienced team efficacy of the team members. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for nationality diversity management

Diversity mindsets and the performance of diverse teams

Diversity can enhance as well as disrupt team performance. Diversity beliefs and climates may play an important moderating role in these effects, but it is unclear what form these should take to promote the positive effects of diversity. Addressing this question in an integration of research in team cognition and diversity, we advance the concept of diversity mindsets, defined as team members’ mental representations of team diversity. These mindsets capture diversity-related goals and associated procedural implications for goal achievement. We develop theory about the accuracy, sharedness, and awareness of sharedness of mindsets as moderators of the diversity-performance relationship. We also identify the determinants of these aspects of diversity mindsets. Finally, we discuss the implications of our model for the management of diversity