When building a diverse team, how can you set them up for success?

This seminal study introduced the concept of psychological safety. Psychological safety is a shared belief that interpersonal risk taking is available and possible within a team. This gives rise to productive experimentation and feedback behaviors, which connect to improved team learning behaviors and team efficacy. Edmonson conducted the study at a manufacturing company with 51 work teams. This approach has since spurred two decades of research on the topic and makes the case for building shared trust with intention.

This review suggests a new way to consider diversity: emergent diversity.  Going beyond trait-based diversity and the composition of a group—which is more static—emergent diversity means taking stock of how individuals interact and how these interactions evolve. In this sense, we might consider diversity as a living quality, shifting and evolving with interactions over time instead of a static set of categories.

This experiment explores how teams might “try on” varying styles to find their best working approach and explores variations of who is in charge, how decisions are made and ideas are shared, as well as formalities and feedback approaches. For example, decision-making might be centralized or decentralized. The experiment used an algorithm to choose different approaches. Instead of selecting one ideal style for all teams, we might aim to intelligently choose, vary, and intervene with different collaboration styles over time.

This paper takes a more granular view on diversity in groups. It’s not just about broad categories individuals belong to or mixing individual backgrounds on a team, but about what the authors call “faultlines”: how people map across more specific attributes of their identity. For example, if people have similar past experiences or status, fall into the same age groups, or share other characteristics like gender or race, we can consider how strong or fragmented these faultlines are across the group, adding some dimension to diversity considerations.

In research and in workplaces, teams are shifting from fixed membership to fluid participation. The paper suggests we are  reconsidering and redefining what we even mean by “team.” The authors propose a definition of teams on a spectrum of operation from “loosely bounded” to “tightly structured." Given this, we can cultivate identity—and how we understand each other—in new ways.

The author analyzed 17,000 patents and their founding teams, tracking which ideas failed and which ideas took off. Multidisciplinary teams showed greater variance in outcomes: although they produced more ideas that were failures, they produced more breakthroughs, too. The divergence and variation from a multidisciplinary team can make breakthroughs more likely. The author shares behavioral economics as an example of a mashup that took off.