Standing together or falling apart? How mega-threats shape cooperative behaviour in diverse teams

Abstract

Events such as the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin which gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement in 2012, the violent killing of Michael Brown in 2014 which sparked week-long nation-wide protests, or the emergence of allegations of sexual harassment against Harvey Weinstein in 2017 have continued to heavily draw public attention to the threat of discrimination against particular demographic subgroups. In this paper, we explore the effect of such diversity related societal events (“mega-threats”) on relationships between members of different demographic subgroups within diverse teams. In particular, we suggest that the occurrence of mega-threats can potentially strongly decrease cooperation between threatened and non-threatened demographic subgroups, but also the potential to instead increase cooperation when team members can more easily develop a strong superordinate team identity due to high levels of team member familiarity or low levels of status discrepancy. Moreover, we argue that mega-threats are more likely to have positive effects on cooperation when team leaders belong to the threatened subgroup and are thus in a better position to take on a bridging function between different subgroups. We test our predictions using a novel large-scale dataset of interactions between White and Black players in the National Basketball Association in the 2014-2015 season during which the United States experienced widespread protests against race-based police violence. Our results provide predominantly supportive evidence for our main suggestions.