Georgia here—The direct context, “Research also shows that diverse teams are more creative, more innovative, better at problem-solving, and better at decision-making,” is true based on what I found.
What I found also seemed pretty clear that diversity doesn’t, overall, have a positive or negative effect on performance. Discussing that seems important if you’re trying to argue that it’ll yield better results, unless you have reason to think that EA is an exception.
(E.g., it seems possible that business teams aren’t a good comparison for local groups or nonprofits, or that most teams in an EA context do more research/creative/problem-solving type work than business teams, so the implication “diversity is likely to help your EA team” would be possibly valid—but whatever premise that’s based on would need to be justified.)
That said, obviously there are reasons to want diversity other than its effect on team performance, and I generally quite liked this article.
I looked into the 4 sources you cite in your article as improving the effectiveness of diverse teams and found the following:
1 didn’t replicate, and the replication found the opposite effect with a much larger sample size (which you link to in your article)
One is a Forbes article that cites a variety of articles, two of which I looked into and didn’t say at all what the Forbes article said they say, with the articles usually saying “we found no significant effects”
One study you cited directly found the opposite result of what you seemed to imply it does, with its results table looking like this:
And the results section of the study explicitly saying:
“whereas background diversity displayed a small negative, yet nonsignificant, relationship with innovation (.133).”
(the thing that did have a positive relation was “job-related diversity” which is very much not the kind of diversity the top-level article is talking about)
The only study that you cited that did seem to cite some positive effects was one with the following results table:
Which found some effects on innovation, though overall it found very mixed effects of diversity, with its conclusion stating:
“Based on the results of a series of meta-analyses, we conclude that cultural diversity in teams can be both an asset and a liability. Whether the process losses associated with cultural diversity can be minimized and the process gains be realized will ultimately depend on the team’s ability to manage the process in an effective manner, as well as on the context within which the team operates.”
I find this troubling. If a small sample of the evidence cited has been misreported or is weak, this seems to cast serious doubt on the evidence cited in the rest of the piece. Also, my prior is that pointing to lots of politically amenable social psychology research is a big red flag.
So your research suggests that it improves creativity, innovation, problem solving and decision making, but not performance. That is a rather unexpected result. Do you have any thoughts on why this did not result in an improvement in total performance?
Georgia here—The direct context, “Research also shows that diverse teams are more creative, more innovative, better at problem-solving, and better at decision-making,” is true based on what I found.
What I found also seemed pretty clear that diversity doesn’t, overall, have a positive or negative effect on performance. Discussing that seems important if you’re trying to argue that it’ll yield better results, unless you have reason to think that EA is an exception.
(E.g., it seems possible that business teams aren’t a good comparison for local groups or nonprofits, or that most teams in an EA context do more research/creative/problem-solving type work than business teams, so the implication “diversity is likely to help your EA team” would be possibly valid—but whatever premise that’s based on would need to be justified.)
That said, obviously there are reasons to want diversity other than its effect on team performance, and I generally quite liked this article.
As a relevant piece of data:
I looked into the 4 sources you cite in your article as improving the effectiveness of diverse teams and found the following:
1 didn’t replicate, and the replication found the opposite effect with a much larger sample size (which you link to in your article)
One is a Forbes article that cites a variety of articles, two of which I looked into and didn’t say at all what the Forbes article said they say, with the articles usually saying “we found no significant effects”
One study you cited directly found the opposite result of what you seemed to imply it does, with its results table looking like this:
https://imgur.com/a/dRms0
And the results section of the study explicitly saying:
“whereas background diversity displayed a small negative, yet nonsignificant, relationship with innovation (.133).”
(the thing that did have a positive relation was “job-related diversity” which is very much not the kind of diversity the top-level article is talking about)
The only study that you cited that did seem to cite some positive effects was one with the following results table:
https://imgur.com/a/tgS6q
Which found some effects on innovation, though overall it found very mixed effects of diversity, with its conclusion stating:
“Based on the results of a series of meta-analyses, we conclude that cultural diversity in teams can be both an asset and a liability. Whether the process losses associated with cultural diversity can be minimized and the process gains be realized will ultimately depend on the team’s ability to manage the process in an effective manner, as well as on the context within which the team operates.”
I find this troubling. If a small sample of the evidence cited has been misreported or is weak, this seems to cast serious doubt on the evidence cited in the rest of the piece. Also, my prior is that pointing to lots of politically amenable social psychology research is a big red flag.
So your research suggests that it improves creativity, innovation, problem solving and decision making, but not performance. That is a rather unexpected result. Do you have any thoughts on why this did not result in an improvement in total performance?