Aligning Differences: Discursive Diversity and Team Performance

How does cognitive diversity in a group affect its performance? Prior research suggests that group cognitive diversity poses a performance tradeoff: diverse groups excel at creativity and innovation but struggle to take coordinated action. Building on the insight that group cognition is not static but is instead dynamically and interactively produced, we develop a novel conceptualization of group cognitive diversity—discursive diversity, or the degree to which the semantic meanings conveyed by group members diverge from one another at a given point in time. We propose that the relationship between this time-varying measure of group cognition and team performance varies as a function of task type: discursive diversity enhances team performance when groups engage in ideational tasks but dampens performance when they undertake coordination tasks. We further argue that successful teams are ones whose members adjust their levels of discursive diversity in tandem rather than haphazardly. Using the tools of computational linguistics to derive a measure of discursive diversity and drawing on a novel longitudinal data set of intragroup electronic communications and performance outcomes for 117 remote software development teams on an online platform (www.gigster.com), we find support for our theory. Our findings suggest that the performance tradeoff of group cognitive diversity is not inescapable: groups can circumvent it by aligning their levels of discursive diversity to match their task requirements and by having members stay aligned with one another as they make these adjustments.

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