Prior work has provided strong evidence that, within organizational settings, teams that bring a diversity of information and perspectives to a task are more effective than teams that do not. If this form of informational diversity confers performance advantages, why do we often see largely homogeneous teams in practice? One canonical argument is that the benefits of informational diversity are in tension with affinity bias. To better understand the impact of this tension on the makeup of teams, we analyze a sequential model of team formation in which individuals care about their team's performance (captured in terms of accurately predicting some future outcome based on a set of features) but experience a cost as a result of interacting with teammates who use different approaches to the prediction task. Our analysis of this simple model reveals a set of subtle behaviors that team-growth dynamics can exhibit: (i) from certain initial team compositions, they can make progress toward better performance but then get stuck partway to optimally diverse teams; while (ii) from other initial compositions, they can also move away from this optimal balance as the majority group tries to crowd out the opinions of the minority. The initial composition of the team can determine whether the dynamics will move toward or away from performance optimality, painting a path-dependent picture of inefficiencies in team compositions. Our results formalize a fundamental limitation of utility-based motivations to drive informational diversity in organizations and hint at interventions that may improve informational diversity and performance simultaneously.
翻译:先前的工作提供了有力的证据,证明在组织环境中,为任务带来多种信息和观点的团队比不起作用的团队更有效。如果这种信息多样性形式赋予了业绩优势,我们为什么经常看到在实践中基本上同一的团队?一个典型的论据是,信息多样性的好处与亲近性偏差存在紧张关系。为了更好地了解这种紧张关系对团队构成的影响,我们分析一个团队组建的顺序模式,其中个人关心团队业绩(从根据一组特征准确预测某些未来结果的角度出发),但经历与使用不同方法进行预测任务的团队伙伴互动的成本。我们对这一简单模型的分析揭示了一系列微妙的行为,团队增长动态能够展示出:(一) 从某些初始团队构成中,他们可以朝着更好的业绩前进,但随后又向最佳多样化团队过渡;(二) 从其他最初的构成中,他们也可以摆脱这种最佳的平衡,因为多数群体试图将少数群体的意见排挤出去。团队最初的构成表明,团队增长动态的微妙性行为,从我们的基本性能效率结构走向最佳的动态,或者从我们的基本性能性能的稳定性组织,可以确定我们的基本性效率结构的成正正的动态。