Team diversity and team performance: Paths to synergetic and disruptive effects

Team diversity holds promises and challenges for team performance. The promise of diversity lies in synergy generated from exchange and integration of diverse perspectives; the challenge lies in social categorization processes that give rise to biases favoring similar others over dissimilar others that disrupt team collaboration. I discuss theory capturing these paths to synergetic and disruptive effects and their contingencies as well as the evidence in research in team diversity and performance. I conclude that the evidence is consistent with the theory, but increasingly suffers from proliferation of moderators and mediators without integrative efforts to consolidate accumulating insights. I also identify theoretical parallels between the study of diversity and demographic dissimilarity as opportunity to develop integrative theory.

Wearing the Same Jersey? The Impact of Players' Cultural Diversity and Shared Team Tenure on National Soccer Team Performance

In the present paper, we empirically analyze a dataset from national soccer teams between 2004 and 2019 to investigate the impact of team members' cultural diversity on final team outcomes. Further, we examine the role of shared team tenure as a proxy of tacit knowledge and within team communications in relation to the cultural diversity-team performance relationship. After addressing a potential endogeneity issue, results from multiple instrumental variable estimation methods implied a higher level of cultural diversity enhanced on-field performance. Meanwhile, increased level of shared team tenure further strengthened the effect associated with cultural diversity on team performance.

Exploring the relationships between team leader’s conflict management styles and team passion: From the emotional perspective

From the emotional perspective, this study explores how team leader’s conflict management styles affect team passion. A theoretical model is constructed which describes the mediating role of positive team emotional climate and the moderating impact of team emotional intelligence. We collect 101 teams paired data including 101 team leaders and 383 team members to test theoretical model. It is shown that leader’s cooperative conflict management style has a significant positive effect on both positive team emotional climate and team passion. Meanwhile, positive team emotional climate plays a mediating role between leader’s cooperative conflict management style and team passion. In addition, team emotional intelligence has a moderating effect between leader’s cooperative style and positive team emotional climate. This study not only provides a new perspective for follow-up research but also expands the research scope of impacts of conflict management styles. In addition, this study forms the underlying mechanism of team leader’s conflict management styles on team passion from the emotional perspective and investigates the mediating effect and moderating effect of emotional variable, which broadens the research on the mechanisms of conflict management styles on team outcomes to a certain extent.