Team diversity, status, social identity management strategies, and team performance

Relational demography research focuses on how status differences among dissimilar team members influence their interactions. Team diversity research focuses on the performance of diverse teams. We integrate these two bodies of work to change the way in which team diversity is conceptualized by explicitly considering the relative status of members of diverse teams as well as the attributes of the status hierarchy within those teams. Team members’ social identity management strategies—their ways of dealing with status differences—affect the likelihood that team processes engender information elaboration, thus affecting team performance. We elucidate why status has an impact on team processes (a) due to the implications of the strategies team members use to gain and maintain status and (b) as a consequence of the proportion of lower and higher status members in the team. In conjunction with explicating our model, we discuss the efficacy of moderators of the relationship between team diversity and performance as well as implications for research on faultlines.