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Description
Despite abundant research and organizational interest, the impact of diversity on team outcomes is unclear. Inconsistent conceptual definitions and operationalizations may account for conflicting effects of diversity. Further, although evidence suggests that contextual moderators are particularly relevant for understanding the association between diversity and outcomes, contextual effects are not consistently accounted for in the literature. Given that most modern work teams collaborate virtually to some extent, the context of team virtuality may be a key omitted moderator that could affect the relationship between team diversity and outcomes. I explored these questions by investigating whether the operationalization of diversity differentially predicts team outcomes. I then examined contextual factors that may moderate the relationship between diversity and team outcomes to ultimately determine which measures of diversity make a difference to teams with differing levels of virtuality. Adopting an inductive approach using archival data, I compared diversity operationalizations in terms of convergence, potential computational bias, and predictive validity for team outcomes. I then assessed the independent main effects of diversity of two attributes that varied in terms of their job-relatedness, and finally tested for moderating effects of virtuality on the association between diversity and team outcomes. Findings showed that diversity metrics demonstrated a high convergence and revealed a small but significant team size bias in uncorrected diversity metric formulas. Diversity metrics showed incremental predictive validity over simple proportional measures for gender, but not the other attributes assessed. Job-related educational specialty diversity and non-job-related ethnicity diversity were not found to show significant effects on team processes and outcomes, but team virtuality did show a positive main effect. Tests for moderation showed that virtuality moderated the relationship between educational specialty diversity and task-based outcomes but did not moderate the relationship between ethnicity diversity and any outcomes. Results suggest that some measurement effects exist for diversity but may be a smaller threat than hypothesized. This thesis extends the literature emphasizing the contextual role of team virtuality in determining team processes and outcomes. Researchers and practitioners seeking to understand the effects of diversity in modern teams should consider the moderating influence of team virtuality.
