Which Two Heads Are Better Than One?: Uncovering the Positive Effects of Diversity in Creative Teams

Abstract

Creative teams drive the idea-economy, yet the determinants of a team's ability to create new ideas are not universally agreed upon. Group-level diversity has gained the most traction as an explanation, where a team's performance is usually attributed to diversity over observed characteristics such as race, gender, or functional expertise. Most agree that these characteristics are not especially important, but rather serve as an indicator of diversity in experiences, which is the actual mechanism that improves team ability. We formalize and test if experientially diverse groups produce more ideas. Because group assignment to projects in the field is rarely exogenous, and experiential diversity is not measured in observational data, we use a laboratory experiment to test our proposal. We find that experientially diverse teams create more ideas and also find no additional effect for gender, racial, socioeconomic, or personality diversity. Our general finding for why diversity may be important indicates that if a correlation exists between characteristic diversity and experiential diversity, the characteristically diverse team will have a higher ability. This generalization can be used to unify divergent results from prior studies and can help explain how dissimilar corporate diversity policies could be equally successful.JEL Codes: C92, J24, M50, O30, O31, O34 Wilson for very helpful suggestions. Finally, this research would not be possible without the help of Michelle Raines in coordinating laboratory use.Given the role innovation plays in economic growth, scholars have long sought to understand how new and better ideas are created. One strand of literature posits that existing ideas are combined to form the new ideas that are the driving force behind modern economic growth (e.g., Weitzman 1998).If new creative ideas are the product of one's knowledge and experiences, then greater diversity in knowledge and experiences leads to greater creativity and greater innovation. In problem-solving contexts, it has been shown that teams can be more productive than individuals (e.g., Cooper and Kagel;2006), and are increasingly used in creativity-centered applications (Jaravel, Petkova, and Bell, 2018;Singh and Fleming, 2010;Wuchty, Jones and Uzzi, 2007;Uzzi et al., 2013). Companies wishing to take advantage of this insight have touted their diversity policies; however, the issue is not settled even among innovative companies.Consider the dissimilar approaches taken by Bell Labs, originally AT&T's research lab, and Google. Bell Labs established a culture where, "eccentric theorists mingled with hands-on engineers, gnarly mechanics, and businesslike problem-solvers, encouraging the cross-fertilization of theory with engineering" (Isaacson 48). Google's Project Aristotle was meant to understand team effectiveness, where their findings were summed up by one of their analysts as: "We were pretty confident that we'd find the perfect mix of individual traits and skills necessary for a stellar team -take one Rhodes Scholar, two...

Experiments on creativity and work design

“…The CAQ offers a proxy for participants' experience and knowledge, thereby allowing me to account for participants' depth and breadth of knowledge. Dutcher and Rodet (2020a, 2020b) verify for individuals and groups that deeper and broader knowledge, as measured by the CAQ, correlates with greater creativity in the CUT.…”

“…Participants also completed a modified version of the Creative Achievement Questionnaire (CAQ; Dutcher & Rodet, 2020a). This questionnaire measures participants' experience in 13 distinct areas, including various arts, sports, and other analytical fields (please see Supporting Information Appendix ).…”

“… 2 2 Dutcher and Rodet (2020a) study team diversity based on knowledge or experience, finding that novel combinations of individual experience lead to more creativity in a divergent‐thinking task. Dutcher and Rodet (2020b) explore organizational learning and find that teams working face‐to‐face are able to transfer creative thinking, but teams that use a “blackboard” approach to teach each other creative thinking do not exhibit organizational learning. …”

From panic to pedagogy: Using online active learning to promote inclusive instruction in ecology and evolutionary biology courses and beyond

“…Solution: Communication and collaboration are critical competencies identified by Vision and Change (Clemmons et al., 2020). Additionally, diverse groups tend to produce more creative and better answers (see Dutcher & Rodet, 2018; Freeman & Huang, 2015; Jang, 2017). Transparent teaching strategies (see Section 1.3.1) that present data on the effectiveness of group collaboration can increase student buy‐in to group work (and active learning in general).…”

From panic to pedagogy: Using online active learning to promote inclusive instruction in ecology and evolutionary biology courses.

“…Solution: Communication and collaboration are critical competencies identified by Vision and Change (Clemmons et al, 2020). Additionally, diverse groups tend to produce more creative and better answers (see Freeman and Huang, 2015;Jang, 2017;Dutcher and Rodet, 2018). Transparent teaching strategies (see Section 1.3.1) that present data on the effectiveness of group collaboration can increase student buy-in to group work (and active learning in general).…”