The role of status diversity in the innovative performance of R&D teams

Abstract

Past research on team diversity has used diversity attributes that are primarily related to team members' either social (e.g., age, ethnicity, and gender) or information‐processing (e.g., educational and functional background) characteristics. In this paper, we focus on status diversity, which is a relatively understudied but highly‐prevalent diversity attribute. However, team status diversity can be highly subjective and complex. Accordingly, we propose and test a curvilinear relationship between status diversity and team innovation through team integration. Furthermore, we study how empowering leadership moderates this indirect curvilinear relationship. The results from 61 R&D teams with 355 team members suggested that status diversity had an inverted U‐shaped relationship with team integration, which then had a positive relationship with team innovation. Moreover, they showed that empowering leadership played a dual role in moderating this curvilinear relationship. More specifically, while it facilitated the positive relationship between the low‐to‐medium degrees of status diversity and team integration, it exacerbated the negative relationship between the medium‐to‐high degrees of status diversity and team integration.