Does diversity make teams work better?

I think a lot of people don't know what diversity is.

and you end up with teams of different shades / colors / sexes etc but very similar in thinking.

diversity should be based on diversity of experiences / thinking not outward appearances that we select for these days.

if you have a team of 1 white guy, 1 woman, 1 black guy and they all grew up in upper middle class and went to harvard that's not diverse.

I do think that people over-hype how useful diversity is, but I always worried that ethic tensions and whatnot would hurt productivity, so I am glad to see that this study supports the harmlessness of diversity.

I wish that the twitter user had cited the study, because I would have liked to actually read the thing. Noting that I haven't read the study though, I would like to put the following pro-diversity argument which I think is relevant and probably isn't covered by this graph:

Diversity helps create products which are useful to larger segments of the population. An instance of this in tech would be Bumble, which was created by a woman. The idea is basically be Tinder but the woman has to initiate the conversation after a match occurs. This apparently partially solves the problem where women feel inundated with messages and leave the platform. The result is that Bumble's gender ratio is 65% male as opposed to Tinder's 75% male.

Link to the paper: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/nscd4

For whatever metric they are using to measure “productivity”, this study says it’s a wash. Others say it’s beneficial. If you step back from questionable quantitative measures, it’s obvious that you will gain qualitative benefits from having a team made up of people with different mindsets, backgrounds, experiences, and opinions, so long as they treat each other with respect and good faith.

Team dynamics are far more complex than just what type of people are on the team, though. Leadership, purpose, process, relationships, communication, openness, morale, and expectations all probably play as much or more a role in productivity and success.

You won’t magically solve all your problems by creating diverse teams, but if you can build diverse teams that work well, you’re probably doing the right stuff in general.

There is some worthwhile discussion of this in a small subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisugly/comments/1cbivz3/cant_fi...

My highlight from that discussion is from someone writing a dissertation on a similar topic "that there's a kind of hill-shaped relationship. Expertise diversity tends to have the greatest benefit at moderate values rather than very high or very low values", which throws off this paper which tries to measure a linear correlation.

The title is more ambiguous than the report's conclusion and follows the "law of headlines":

  Our results here show that the picture is more complex –when reduced to a single estimate, the average (linear) correlation between team diversities and team performances is too small to matter substantively.

Applause for including demographic, job-related and cognitive diversity.

In my experience, teams that work best consist of members who a) have a lot in common in terms of upbringing, education, sense of humor(!) etc., and b) do not/are not forced to compete among themselves too much, which correlates with a). It does help to have one or two outliers though.

I understood the theory to not be about performance but about creativity and flexibility. So a team will be more creative but less coherent with more diversity. Literally it means that a more diverse team is going to be less similar between itself. Coherence and stability is opposed to creativity and diversity. Also teams that are most similar to each other and are not flexible and who change little tend to be happier and stable.

It does explain some pushback against diversity because it will cause at least some change and increase working instability at least a little bit within a team. Managers of teams should be able to manage change effectively because people generally do not like change.

But the change isn't for performance. It's changing for change.

Tweets are useless here, these words are too vague to interpret without more commentary (how are we measuring diversity, what is effectiveness, etc, all the usual stuff I'm sure the researchers explain).

However the preprint article itself is 130 pages and I'm not reading through it.

Diversity is not something companies do to become successful. It’s something companies do after they become successful. It’s virtue signaling.