When does gender diversity enhance team performance? The dual need for visionary leadership and team tenure

Abstract

Teams in organizations are becoming more gender diverse as women continue to participate more in the workforce than ever before. Prior theory and research indicate that the characteristics of the team influence whether gender diversity in a team is an asset or a detriment. As such, this research explores a contingency model of the relation between gender diversity and team performance and looks to understand conditions that make this relation positive or negative. Specifically, we examine how leader vision communication (i.e., visionary leadership) affects the relation between gender diversity and team performance. Results from a sample of 595 full‐time employees across 106 teams in China indicate that leader vision communication moderates the relation between gender diversity and team performance such that when leader vision communication is low gender diversity decreases team performance and when leader vision communication is high gender diversity has no significant relation with team performance. We also test whether team tenure changes this relationship. Our results suggest that gender diversity improves team performance when both leader vision communication and team tenure are high. The findings in our sample demonstrate that gender diversity can help teams enhance performance, but only when the conditions are right for gender‐diverse teams to flourish.

The boundaries of vision communication—The effects of vision‐task goal‐alignment on leaders' effectiveness

“…Vision communication is a central part of various highly successful leadership paradigms, such as TFL (Bass, 1985; Shamir et al, 1993) and servant leadership (van Dierendonck, 2011), but has also been examined as independent construct (Kearney et al, 2019; Kelemen et al, 2020; Margolis & Ziegert, 2016; van Houwelingen et al, 2017). For instance, vision communication has been found to be related to venture growth (Baum et al, 1998), successful organizational change (Venus et al, 2019), benefits out of diversity (Kelemen et al, 2020), and be especially effective when combined with empowering leadership (Kearney et al, 2019) and well suited in times of crisis (Hunt et al, 1999).…”

The Machiavellian Organization: A Multilevel Model to Understand Decision Making in Organizations

“…Organizations could also consider fostering other values, paradigms, or practices. Case in point, leadership research highlights that individuals in power can utilize it for the benefit of other stakeholders (Eva, Robin, Sendjaya, van Dierendonck, & Liden, 2019; Kelemen, Matthews, Zhang, Bradley, & Liu, 2020). To limit the emergence of a Machiavellian climate, a company may enclose values of autonomy and aggrandizement within space or time to encourage the positive outcomes that can result from power-seeking behaviors.…”

Revisiting the Effects of Gender Diversity in Small Groups on Divergent Thinking: A Large-Scale Study Using Synchronous Electronic Brainstorming

“…Specifically concerning gender diversity in groups and its effect on creativity, numerous empirical studies, meta-analyses and literature reviews have been conducted ( Wood, 1987 ; Bowers et al, 2000 ; Webber and Donahue, 2001 ; Lee and Farh, 2004 ; Joshi and Roh, 2009 ; Kelemen et al, 2020 ), but no consistent effects of gender diversity on creativity were found. Studies demonstrated positive effects ( Schruijer and Mostert, 1997 ; Curşeu et al, 2007 ; Díaz-García et al, 2013 ), negative effects ( Cady and Valentine, 1999 ) or no effect ( Herschel, 1994 ).…”