Team Diversity, Team Processes, and Team Performance: The Moderating Role of Leader Mood

Abstract

Drawing on the Categorization-Elaboration (van Knippenberg, De Dreu, & Homan, 2004) and the Emotions-as-Social-Information model (Van Kleef, 2009), respectively, we hypothesized that leader mood will impact the respective relationships between team diversity and collective team identification and elaboration of task-relevant information. We further hypothesized that the association between elaboration and objective team performance will be moderated by team identification. Testing these hypotheses with data collected from 59 financial services teams at three different time points, we found that, given high levels of leader positive mood, team diversity was positively related to team identification and negatively associated with elaboration of task-relevant information. In contrast, given high levels of leader negative mood, diversity was negatively related to team identification and positively associated with elaboration of task-relevant information. Such incongruence between identification and elaboration poses an intriguing challenge with respect to predictions based on the CEM and previous research on team diversity. Also in contrast to previous theory and research, we found that elaboration of task-relevant information was conducive to objective team performance only when collective team identification was high. This study contributes to the literature by illustrating the central role of the leader in unlocking the potential of diversity, by shedding light on the link between team diversity and affect, and by providing new insights into the role of information elaboration in diverse teams.