A Brief Intervention to Promote Team Diversity Beliefs and Team Information Elaboration

Abstract

Despite previous research suggesting the importance of team members’ perceived value of diversity (i.e., diversity beliefs) for exchange of information in teams, little attention has been paid to whether and how team diversity beliefs can be influenced. Drawing on theory and research on team diversity beliefs, we propose that team diversity beliefs result from both a promotion (compared to a prevention) focus and a personalized (compared to factual) knowledge. Results from an experiment with 175 randomly composed teams (each team demonstrating high diversity in preferred work approaches) revealed that promotion focus and personalized knowledge independently contributed to higher team diversity beliefs and, in turn, indirectly, team information elaboration. These effects further improved the team’s ability to integrate opposing viewpoints (i.e., team integrative complexity). Our results help to uncover key antecedents of diversity beliefs, and add to a growing body of evidence demonstrating the pivotal role of team diversity beliefs in improving the extent to which team members share information and integrate diverse perspectives.