The Diversity Heuristic: How Team Demographic Composition Influences Judgments of Team Creativity

Devon Proudfoot (), Zachariah Berry (), Edward H. Chang () and Min B. Kay ()
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Devon Proudfoot: Human Resource Studies Department, School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853
Zachariah Berry: Organizational Behavior Department, ILR School, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853
Edward H. Chang: Negotiation, Organizations, and Markets Unit, Harvard Business School, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts 02163
Min B. Kay: MBA Department of Leadership and People Management, University Canada West, Vancouver, British Columbia V6Z 0E5, Canada

Management Science, 2024, vol. 70, issue 6, 3879-3901

Abstract: Despite mixed evidence for the relationship between demographic diversity and creativity, we propose that observers hold a lay belief that demographic diversity increases creativity and apply this lay belief in judgments about teams and their creative work. Across eight preregistered studies ( n = 5,530), we find that observers judge teams diverse in terms of race and gender to be more creative than teams homogeneous in terms of race and gender, including in incentive-compatible predictions made about real teams competing in a creativity challenge. We also find that products attributed to demographically diverse teams are evaluated as more creative compared with identical products attributed to demographically homogenous teams. Mediation analyses provide evidence consistent with the notion that people perceive demographic diversity (i.e., social category differences) to be correlated with cognitive diversity (i.e., difference of perspectives), and this belief contributes to attributions of greater creativity to diverse teams and the ideas they generate. We can also turn off the perceived association between demographic diversity and creativity by directly manipulating people’s perceptions of team cognitive diversity. Furthermore, we find evidence of a curvilinear relationship between the proportion of racial minorities or women in a group and judgments of the group’s creativity. Together, our results suggest that the popular uptake of the belief that diversity boosts creativity may impact how creativity is identified in organizational contexts.

Keywords: diversity; teams; race; gender; social perception; creativity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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