Unlocking the effects of gender faultlines on team creativity: Is activation the key?

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to use faultline theory to examine the effects of gender diversity on team creativity. Results from 80 teams working on an idea generation task indicated that the activation of gender faultlines negatively affected the number and overall creativity of ideas. However, gender faultlines that were not activated had no effect. Results also indicated that the relationship between activated gender faultlines and team creativity was partially mediated by the level of conflict within the team. Specifically, emotional conflict partially mediated the effects of activated gender faultlines on the number of ideas generated. Implications are discussed, as well as possible limitations and directions for future research.

Diversity faultlines, shared objectives, and top management team performance

“…faultlines) and not on normative fit (cf. Pearsall et al, 2008). Moreover, the present analysis underscores the conclusion that comparative fit and normative fit should not be studied in isolation, but rather as interactive influences on social categorization salience, and thus on team process and performance.…”

“…Societal gender stereotypes may, for instance, give subjective meaning to a gender categorization (cf. Pearsall et al, 2008), whereas a categorization in terms of body length may seem meaningless in most organizational contexts (even when it would capture differences between team members equally well as a gender categorization; i.e. given similar comparative fit).…”

“…cognitive activation; Turner et al, 1987) of categorizations that drives subgrouping effects and that there is no one-on-one relationship between differences between team members and categorization salience. That is, greater diversity does not necessarily result in stronger categorization processes and the same diversity may be more or less problematic, contingent on the triggers of categorization salience (Lau and Murnighan, 1998;Pearsall et al, 2008;Randel, 2002). An important implication of this insight is that to predict the categorization effects of diversity we should focus on factors influencing categorization salience and not just on the degree to which there are differences between team members (van Knippenberg et al, 2004a).…”

“…gender vs tenure and functional background in the current study), but also as a factor that for the same attribute may vary across situations (cf. Pearsall et al, 2008;van Knippenberg et al, 2004a). A gender categorization will, for instance, have greater normative fit in task settings that are more strongly associated with gender stereotypes (e.g.…”

Incongruent Aesthetic Preferences in Design Collaboration: An Enabler or Barrier for Novelty and Appropriateness?

“…In addition, the pair-type of collaboration is common in actual design practice (Kalay, 2004;Fernie, 2006). In view of a research method, the pairtype of collaboration is perhaps succinct to control and prevent social and power dynamics, caused from many participants' involvements (Pearsall et al, 2008). In addition, this study only focused on urban and street furniture design, and thus it is unknown whether the results are generalizable to other forms of design.…”