Individual Beliefs about the Value of Diversity and Information Elaboration Behaviors in Teams

Prior research finds that demographic diversity can benefit the performance of organizational teams through an increase in the range of cognitive resources that the teams can apply to their tasks. However, in order to produce these benefits, teams must engage in information elaboration, that is, individuals within the team must offer their unique perspectives, seek those of others, and integrate various information inputs into the team output. Explanations for information elaboration within diverse teams have thus far focused on team-level factors. In this paper, we propose that individual perspectives on why diversity is valuable to teams will affect individual likelihood of engaging in information elaboration behaviors. Using research on implicit theories and diversity management, we dimensionalize individual perspectives on the value of diversity, and develop propositions regarding how they might affect individual information elaboration behavior within diverse teams. We also discuss the theoretical and practical contributions of our research model.