In a recent paper published in Scientific Reports, Fabian Baumann, Agnieszka Czaplicka & Iyad Rahwan — all researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development — analyze how the underlying social network of a group impacts the effect of diversity on performance.
"It is widely believed that diversity arising from different skills enhances the performance of teams, and in particular, their ability to learn and innovate," they write. “However, diversity has also been associated with negative effects on the communication and coordination within collectives. Yet, despite the importance of diversity as a concept, we still lack a mechanistic understanding of how its impact is shaped by the underlying social network.”
They found that diversity was beneficial in some circumstances and harmful in others. When completing simple tasks, for instance, diversity consistently impaired teams' performance. However, when completing complex tasks, diversity could be beneficial, but it depended upon the density of the underlying network — or the number of connections each person has to other people in the network.
For networks where people have fewer connections on average, diversity also hampered performance on complex tasks. However, in networks where people have multiple, overlapping connections, diversity was clearly beneficial and boosted collective performance.
"Overall, our findings suggest that diversity offers a pathway to boost collective performance in complex tasks," the researchers conclude. “Specifically, we have shown that the more we are connected, the more we can benefit from diversity to solve complex problems—a finding which informs the compilation of problem solving teams in an increasingly interconnected and diverse world.”
Too often organizations focus on diversity metrics as an end in itself for improving performance. As we have discussed elsewhere, research supports the idea that the benefits of diversity are maximized when the organization itself is structured to make the best use of it. In other words, while diversity is valuable, the true focus should be on inclusion.
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