How to Manage Diversity and Enhance Team Performance: Evidence from Online Doctor Teams in China

Abstract

(1) Background: Traditional one-to-one online consultations with doctors often fail to provide timely and accurate treatment plans; consequently, creating cross-hospital and cross-regional teams has become a new pattern for doctors aiming to offer Internet medical services. Because the online doctor team is a new virtual organizational model, it remains to be explained and investigated. (2) Methods: Combining the information processing view and the social categorization view, this study takes the perspective of team diversity and empirically investigates the effect of team diversity on team performance. We consider four kinds of team diversity, including status capital diversity, decision capital diversity, online reputation diversity, and professional knowledge diversity, and we investigate how team composition from the diversity perspective affects online doctor team performance and how leader reputation moderates the effect of team diversity on team performance. We use secondary data from a leading online medical consultation platform in China (Good Doctor), and our research data include 1568 teams with a total of 5481 doctors. (3) Results: The results show that status capital diversity and decision capital diversity negatively affect team performance; diversity in terms of online reputation and professional knowledge positively affect team performance; and leader reputation moderates the impact of status capital diversity and online reputation on team performance. (4) Conclusions: Our study offers management suggestions on how to form a high-performance doctor team and provides advice for the future development of online doctor teams.