Stimulating Creativity in Gender-Diverse Teams: Testing Diversity Training in a Field Experiment

Abstract

The link between gender diversity and team creativity is ambiguous. On the one hand, diverse viewpoints and ideas associated with gender diversity may stimulate team creativity. On the other hand, gender diversity may disrupt team creativity due to social-categorization processes and intergroup biases. This ambivalence underlines the need for appropriately managing processes in gender-diverse teams. This study focuses on the potential of team diversity training to increase creativity in gender-diverse teams. Addressing diversity as a double-edged sword, we argue that diversity training can stimulate team creativity by facilitating both team identification and teams’ ability to elaborate on their diverse perspectives. Using a randomized field experiment with 71 organizational teams (N = 534 individuals), we tested the effects of two different diversity training programs (compared to no training) on team creativity in gender-diverse teams. Team diversity training focused on fostering identification (as the social-categorization perspective would suggest) alone did not stimulate creativity. Only when team diversity training additionally focused on the ability to elaborate on diverse viewpoints, it improved information elaboration, which subsequently increased the creativity of more gender-diverse teams. Speaking to processes and contingency factors of diversity training effectiveness, our research has important theoretical implications and helps to illuminate when diversity training is more likely to be effective.