Beyond a Curse or Blessing: The Effects of Team Diversity on Team Creativity and Innovation

Creativity and innovation are vital to the success of any organisation. Diverse teams and human resources are often desired by organisations aiming to benefit from team members’ varied perspectives, values, ideas, and networks, which support the growing demand for creativity and innovation. However, team diversity is often associated with conflict, judgement, bias, stress, and a lack of communication or trust, which are detrimental to team performance, creativity, and innovation. Therefore, building knowledge about team diversity’s mechanism is essential to making the best use of diverse teams, and sustainably managing them to achieve long-term benefits. This paper aims to provide a brief review of theoretical and empirical research on diversity and creativity/innovation at the team level and to shed light on the most promising areas for future research.