Team Diversity and Team Creativity

There is a long-standing belief in the value of diversity for team creativity. An evaluation of the evidence, however, suggests that team diversity does not reliably produce team creativity, and that the challenge for team creativity research and practice is to identify the moderating influences that allow teams to reap the benefits of diversity in their creative performance. We review the available evidence for the moderating influences on the relationship between team diversity and team creativity, and we conclude that the categorization-elaboration model (CEM) of team diversity and performance provides a useful framework to understand these moderating influences. We discuss how the CEM can both guide the further development of the study of team creativity and the integration of the study of diversity effects on team creativity and of cross-level effects on individual creativity.