An integration-and-learning perspective on gender diversity in self-managing teams: The roles of learning goal...

Contemporary organizations commonly use self-managing teams to structure work as a way to achieve competitive advantage. Although diversity on visible demographic characteristics-such as gender-is a critical determinant of team functioning, our knowledge about when and how gender diversity affects performance in self-managing teams is still nascent. Building upon the integration-and-learning perspective and recent developments in the information and decision-making approach on diversity, we investigate when (team learning goal orientation as a contingency factor) and how (shared leadership as a structural mediating mechanism) gender diversity benefits task performance in self-managing teams. We conducted two studies to test our hypotheses. In Study 1, we studied 66 teams that participated in a team simulation. As expected, we found that team learning goal orientation acted as a boundary condition qualifying the effect of gender diversity on self-managing team task performance, such that gender diversity benefited task performance for teams that were higher (vs. lower) in learning goal orientation. In Study 2, we tested shared leadership as a mediating mechanism via which gender diversity benefited team task performance in learning-goal-oriented teams. We surveyed 67 teams multiple times over the span of 6 months, and found that gender diversity benefited the task role enactment of teams with higher (vs. lower) learning goal orientation through shared leadership. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).