Team diversity and manufacturing process innovation performance: the moderating role of technology maturity

Abstract

This research studies how technological maturity in manufacturing process innovation (MPI) projects moderates the impacts of different types of team diversity on technical success. While researchers consider the variety aspect of team diversity to be beneficial as a rich source of information, they consider disparity and separation to be detrimental as sources of social barriers to information processing. However, demographic manifestations of diversity involve a combination of these aspects. We therefore posit that technology maturity is an important moderator which may raise or lower the influence of one diversity aspect over another. Specifically, we examine five manifestations of project team diversity, including three types of variety (functional variety, full-time/part-time variety, location tenure variety) and two types of disparity (education level disparity, experience level disparity). Results from 183 MPI projects in US companies indicate that technology maturity negatively moderates the relationship between functional variety and MPI technical performance. It positively moderates the relationships between experience level disparity and MPI technical performance, and between location tenure variety and MPI technical performance. The impacts of education level disparity and full-time/part-time variety do not appear to be moderated by technology maturity.