Stimulating gender-diverse teams’ creativity through team diversity training: A field experiment

Abstract Evidence of the gender diversity–team creativity relationship is inconsistent, highlighting the importance of managing the underlying processes. Building on the two predominant perspectives on team diversity processes, social categorization and information/decision-making, we propose that diversity training is most conducive to gender-diverse teams’ creativity when it stimulates information elaboration in addition to strengthening team identification. In a randomized field experiment with 446 individuals nested within 57 intact organizational teams, we examined the effectiveness of two team diversity training designs versus no training in enhancing the creativity of gender-diverse teams. One training focused solely on the social perspective (identification-focused), while the other addressed both the social and informational perspectives (identification-and-elaboration-focused). We tested the interactive effects of the two training conditions (vs. no training) and gender diversity on team creativity using pre- and post-measures. The findings provide partial support for our model. Identification-focused training did not stimulate the creativity of gender-diverse teams, and neither training condition affected team identification. Relative to no training, identification-and-elaboration-focused training was positively linked to team creativity via improved information elaboration among highly gender-diverse teams. The contrast between the two active training conditions was however not significant, and the evidence for the information-elaboration pathway should be interpreted cautiously. These findings provide initial field experimental evidence that team diversity training targeting information elaboration can help highly gender-diverse teams use their informational resources for creativity, contributing to the literature on managing (gender-)diverse teams. They further underscore the need for replication and testing the effectiveness of specific training components.