From the boardroom to the stockroom, corporations place a premium on forming and motivating effective teams. Although the focus in recent years has been on assembling teams with diverse skill sets and points of view, researchers have disagreed about the effects of such diversity on productivity. Now a new stream of research may lead to some answers.“Networks, Diversity and Productivity: The Social Capital of Corporate R&D Teams,” in the July-August 2001 issue of Organization Science, attempts to reconcile two seemingly contradictory camps: those who feel that diversity leads to better performance because diverse perspectives will add a creative edge and those who feel that diversity impedes performance because diverse teams are less cohesive.Previous research has focused on the trade-off between those two effects to determine whether diversity is good or bad for productivity overall. But authors Ezra W. Zuckerman, associate professor of strategic management at Stanford University, and Ray Reagans, assistant professor of management at Columbia Business School, suggest that diversity, per se, may not be the issue.
