For years the social categorization and the information/decision- making perspective have guided research to the relationship between work group diversity and performance. Recently, however, it has been noticed that status-related processes too may account for the diversity-performance relationship. In this conceptual paper, we advance a process model of the diversity- performance relationship that depicts how status-related processes relate to and interact with social categorization and information elaboration processes. Among others, we propose that work group diversity through social categorization processes more or less automatically yields within-group status differences, and that these status differences impact group behavior (of which information elaboration is just one aspect) and group performance. We advance a research agenda and discuss the implications of our model for managing diverse work groups.