Revisiting the positive effects of diversity on creative teams in novel creative tasks

Teamwork matters in the modern economy, and recent scholarship convincingly suggests that diversity in experience, training, and knowledge allows teams to more readily generate novel ideas in numerous forms, including patents, scientific scholarship, and laboratory experiments. Experimental research often uses the alternative uses task to observe participants engaging in divergent thinking. This study extends the study of diversity in experience, training, and knowledge to novel creative tasks, including a verb task, a business slogan task, and a hypothesis task. It also extends previous research by analyzing diversity’s effects on the originality of ideas based on latent semantic analysis and on the propensity of teams to use unique words to form creative ideas. Results indicate that, consistent with previous research, diversity in knowledge, training, and achievement outside the laboratory is associated with teams generating a greater number of ideas; however, it does not affect overall originality or uniqueness.