Being Different, But Close: How and When Faultlines Enhance Team Learning

Abstract

Although work-group diversity may have potential positive impact on team learning and performance, the way diversity characteristics are distributed, influences whether teams exploit this potential. In this quantitative field study on 52 teams in two health-care organizations, we examined the relationship between informational faultlines (the demographic alignment of the informational characteristics of the members in a group, creating relatively homogeneous subgroups) and team learning. We used a moderated-mediation model to test the interplay between faultline strength (the alignment of characteristics) and distance (between subgroups, based on the characteristics) on task and process lear..