The role of status diversity in the innovative performance of R&D teams

Past research on team diversity has used diversity attributes that are primarily related to team members' either social (e.g., age, ethnicity, and gender) or information-processing (e.g., educational and functional background) characteristics. In this paper, we focus on status diversity, which is a relatively understudied but highly-prevalent diversity attribute. However, team status diversity can be highly subjective and complex. Accordingly, we propose and test a curvilinear relationship between status diversity and team innovation through team integration. Furthermore, we study how empowering leadership moderates this indirect curvilinear relationship. The results from 61 R & D teams with 355 team members suggested that status diversity had an inverted U-shaped relationship with team integration, which then had a positive relationship with team innovation. Moreover, they showed that empowering leadership played a dual role in moderating this curvilinear relationship. More specifically, while it facilitated the positive relationship between the low-to-medium degrees of status diversity and team integration, it exacerbated the negative relationship between the medium-to-high degrees of status diversity and team integration.