how does diversity encourage innovation and problem solving in education

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Welcoming diversity in the learning environment: teachers' handbook for inclusive education

This teachers' handbook is intended to serve as a practical resource to help teachers and teacher educators to gain understanding of the multiple issues of inclusion in their day-to-day work and acquire competencies that facilitate inclusive pedagogy. The handbook is comprised of nine modules - each of which presents the conceptual discussion of key topics related to inclusion and diversity and features some promising case studies, instruments and approaches. It also provides a framework for ensuring learning continuity in the wake of crises and emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and deals with a range of topics aimed at building the capacities of teachers and teacher educators for recovery and resilience in education systems in the COVID-19 context.

#InclusiveEducation #Equity&InclusionInEducation #TeachersDevelopment #TeachersProgramme

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The Benefits of Inclusion and Diversity in the Classroom

Diverse group of students pose in a group in front of their school building.

It’s been a little more than 60 years since Brown vs. Board of Education, one of the most important Supreme Court cases in the history of the United States. The decision made it illegal to segregate public schools on the basis of race. That cornerstone decision of the civil rights movement has played a major role in breaking down racial barriers in the decades since. It has also enabled social scientists to study how diversity in the classroom leads to students’ increased cultural understanding, stronger critical thinking skills and enhanced creativity, which all better prepare them for adulthood.

The National Education Association reports that 2014 was the first year in which the majority of students in American public schools represented racial and ethnic minorities. In addition, the Southern Education Foundation found that in 2013, a full 51 percent of public school children were from low-income families. While student demographics vary greatly across the country, there is no question that cultural respect and inclusion are values that matter greatly in the modern classroom. Those considering enrolling in a Doctorate in Education (EdD) program should seek out one that emphasizes the importance of inclusion and diversity in the classroom, and the benefits they can provide.

Exploring the Benefits of Classroom Diversity and Inclusion

Diverse schools feature differences in ethnicity, socioeconomic class, religion, reading level, athletic ability, background, gender, personality, and much more. Strong EdD programs teach educators to value the unique aspects of what makes each student different, and helps them embrace those differences in the classroom.

An in-depth research review of dozens of other studies on diversity—conducted by The Century Foundation, a New York-based think tank—found that having different and divergent perspectives can create positive learning outcomes. Those outcomes, explored below, can have benefits that reflect well beyond students’ graduation and can impact their lives going forward.

Diversity Improves Cognitive Skills and Critical Thinking

The presence of diversity in the classroom allows students to consider perspectives and opinions beyond those they’ve already formed or were shaped in early life by family and friends. By presenting students with viewpoints far different from their own, it gives them the opportunity to think critically about their own beliefs and examine the world in fresh ways. As noted by an article in Scientific American, exposure to diversity alters the way individuals think by promoting creativity and innovation, as well as decision-making and problem-solving skills. As the article summarizes, “Diversity jolts us into cognitive action in ways that homogeneity simply does not.”

Exposure to Diversity Helps Students Enter Adulthood

When students enter the professional world, they join a vast and diverse workforce. Interacting with people of all different backgrounds and mindsets can present a challenge without prior exposure to diversity, especially at a younger age. Companies are taking note of their employees’ ability to handle diversity with grace and maturity; 96 percent of major employers, according to the Century Foundation, say it is vital that employees are able to work with people from diverse backgrounds.

Diversity Prepares Students for Citizenship

As part of the Century Foundation’s research study on diversity, the authors reviewed 27 different studies about the effects of diversity on people’s willingness to interact with and improve their local community—a concept known as civic engagement. The study found that experiences with diversity in college do lead to increased civic engagement. This indicates the more involved citizens are with their government and political landscape, and the more educated they become about government processes, the more informed decisions they can make about how they are governed. As the U.S. Department of Education notes, students’ experiences with diversity help mold them into more engaged citizens.

Diversity Promotes Creativity

At its core, creativity is all about bringing together different ideas and transforming them to make something new, unique, and personal. The more ideas and experiences people are exposed to, the more creative they can be. Indeed, Scientific American cites a study conducted by several research professors who found that groups with racial diversity significantly outperformed groups without diversity in a problem-solving scenario. In professional and nonprofessional situations that call for creativity, it is a wise choice to bring together diverse perspectives.

Discover How to Encourage Inclusivity and Diversity as an Educator

As has been discussed, diversity in the classroom has numerous positive benefits for students, but how can educators ensure their pupils are getting the most out of interacting with their diverse peers? Well-trained educators, like those with an EdD, are equipped with the tools to encourage the exchange of ideas and interpersonal understanding. No matter what level of education, elementary school teachers through college professors can all utilize the following strategies to benefit their classrooms.

Learn about Students’ Cultural Backgrounds

Classroom students aren’t the only ones who can benefit from learning about what makes them diverse. According to the NDT Resource Center, an academic source committed to nondestructive evaluation, educators should also get to know their students and what makes them unique, thereby discovering the viewpoint from which they see the world and their personal learning style. For an educator, understanding cultural diversity in the classroom is a crucial part of being able to anticipate where certain lessons might lead, or any issues that might arise between students of different backgrounds. Educators can establish a tone of inclusion, emphasizing that all perspectives are valuable.

Create a Culturally Responsive Learning Environment

An educator who properly creates a culturally responsive environment will have fostered a classroom where students become respectful and understanding of cultures different from their own. Those students are typically more willing to listen respectfully to different viewpoints, rather than mock, scorn, or fear the unfamiliar. The best way for educators to achieve this, according to The Edvocate, is to teach students that people who do not look the same as them—or who come from different socioeconomic backgrounds, follow different religious traditions, speak different languages, or have a different sexual orientation or gender identity—are still just the same as them on the inside.

Allow Students to Learn about Their Community

Learning about one’s own culture is just as important as learning about others when it comes to developing cultural understanding among students. Educators with a strong teaching background such as an EdD can facilitate projects for their students that encourage them to get to know their own history. The NDT Resource Center suggests activities such as visiting community landmarks of importance to their culture, and interviewing important members of their community. Students can then be given the opportunity to share what they discover with their classmates.

Establish a Zero-Indifference Negative Behavior Policy

In recent years, schools have enacted zero-tolerance policies in an attempt to curb bullying, harassment, and intimidation. However, the tide is now shifting toward zero-indifference policies instead, according to GLSEN. Zero-indifference is an alternative that promotes safety in schools by consistently and firmly addressing disrespectful behavior. Unlike zero-tolerance, in which a first offense results in punishments as harsh as suspension or expulsion, zero-indifference allows the teacher to use culturally insensitive moments as opportunities for learning and understanding. The Tolerance.org project of the Southern Poverty Law Center recommends zero-indifference policies when it comes to addressing bullying and harassment, as does the Anti-Defamation League; the American Civil Liberties Union; the Respect for All Project; and the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network—according to research by Jacqueline Leung on the Oregon Commission on Black Affairs.

Learn How to Foster Cultural Diversity in the Classroom

Teachers who wish to be at the forefront of their profession should have a strong foundation in understanding diversity and how to create an environment of inclusion in the classroom. To accomplish this, educators would do well to explore an award-winning education program, such as American University’s online Doctorate of Education . The curriculum is designed to provide educators with the tools and understanding to adapt to any classroom, regardless of its diverse student makeup—and to ultimately foster a wider appreciation of our human differences.

Education Week, “Six Ways Teachers Can Foster Cultural Awareness in the Classroom”

Leung, Jacqueline, “Reforming School Discipline for Equity and Excellence in Oregon: Recommendations for Policy and Practice”

National Education Association, “Diverse Student Populations Are in the Classroom”

Scientific American, “How Diversity Makes us Smarter”

The Century Foundation, “How Racially Diverse Schools and Classrooms Can Benefit All Students”

The Edvocate, “Ways to Promote Diverse Cultures in the Classroom”

Tolerance.org, “Critical Practices for Anti-Bias Education”

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Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

How Diversity Makes Us Smarter

The first thing to acknowledge about diversity is that it can be difficult.

In the U.S., where the dialogue of inclusion is relatively advanced, even the mention of the word “diversity” can lead to anxiety and conflict. Supreme Court justices disagree on the virtues of diversity and the means for achieving it. Corporations spend billions of dollars to attract and manage diversity both internally and externally, yet they still face discrimination lawsuits, and the leadership ranks of the business world remain predominantly white and male.

It is reasonable to ask what good diversity does us. Diversity of expertise confers benefits that are obvious—you would not think of building a new car without engineers, designers, and quality-control experts—but what about social diversity? What good comes from diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation? Research has shown that social diversity in a group can cause discomfort, rougher interactions, a lack of trust, greater perceived interpersonal conflict, lower communication, less cohesion, more concern about disrespect, and other problems. So, what is the upside?

how does diversity encourage innovation and problem solving in education

The fact is that if you want to build teams or organizations capable of innovating, you need diversity. Diversity enhances creativity. It encourages the search for novel information and perspectives, leading to better decision making and problem solving. Diversity can improve the bottom line of companies and lead to unfettered discoveries and breakthrough innovations. Even simply being exposed to diversity can change the way you think.

This is not just wishful thinking: It is the conclusion I draw from decades of research from organizational scientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and demographers.

Informational diversity fuels innovation

This makes obvious sense when we talk about diversity of disciplinary backgrounds—think again of the interdisciplinary team building a car. The same logic applies to social diversity. People who are different from one another in race, gender, and other dimensions bring unique information and experiences to bear on the task at hand. A male and a female engineer might have perspectives as different from one another as an engineer and a physicist—and that is a good thing.

“We need diversity if we are to change, grow, and innovate”

Research on large, innovative organizations has shown repeatedly that this is the case.

For example, business professors Cristian Deszö of the University of Maryland and David Ross of Columbia University studied the effect of gender diversity on the top firms in Standard & Poor’s Composite 1500 list, a group designed to reflect the overall U.S. equity market. First, they examined the size and gender composition of firms’ top management teams from 1992 through 2006. Then they looked at the financial performance of the firms. In their words, they found that, on average, “female representation in top management leads to an increase of $42 million in firm value.” They also measured the firms’ “innovation intensity” through the ratio of research and development expenses to assets. They found that companies that prioritized innovation saw greater financial gains when women were part of the top leadership ranks.

Racial diversity can deliver the same kinds of benefits. In a study conducted in 2003, Orlando Richard, a professor of management at the University of Texas at Dallas, and his colleagues surveyed executives at 177 national banks in the U.S., then put together a database comparing financial performance, racial diversity, and the emphasis the bank presidents put on innovation. For innovation-focused banks, increases in racial diversity were clearly related to enhanced financial performance.

Of course, not all studies get the same results. Even those that haven’t found benefits for racially diverse firms suggest that there is certainly no negative financial impact—and there are benefits that may go beyond the short-term bottom line. For example, in a paper published in June of this year , researchers examined the financial performance of firms listed in DiversityInc ’s list of Top 50 Companies for Diversity. They found the companies on the list did outperform the S&P 500 index—but the positive impact disappeared when researchers accounted for the size of the firms. That doesn’t mean diversity isn’t worth pursuing, conclude the authors:

In an age of increasing globalization, a diverse workforce may provide both tangible and intangible benefits to firms over the long run, including increased adaptability in a changing market. Also, as the United States moves towards the point in which no ethnic majority exists, around 2050, companies’ upper management and lower-level workforce should naturally be expected to reflect more diversity. Consequently, diversity initiatives would likely generate positive reputation effects for firms.

Evidence for the benefits of diversity can be found well beyond the U.S. In August 2012, a team of researchers at the Credit Suisse Research Institute issued a report in which they examined 2,360 companies globally from 2005 to 2011, looking for a relationship between gender diversity on corporate management boards and financial performance. Sure enough, the researchers found that companies with one or more women on the board delivered higher average returns on equity, lower gearing (that is, net debt to equity), and better average growth.

How diversity provokes new thinking

Active Listening

Connect with a partner through empathy and understanding.

This effect is not limited to race and gender. For example, last year professors of management Denise Lewin Loyd of the University of Illinois, Cynthia Wang of Oklahoma State University, Robert B. Lount, Jr., of Ohio State University, and I asked 186 people whether they identified as a Democrat or a Republican, then had them read a murder mystery and decide who they thought committed the crime. Next, we asked the subjects to prepare for a meeting with another group member by writing an essay communicating their perspective. More important, in all cases, we told the participants that their partner disagreed with their opinion but that they would need to come to an agreement with the other person. Everyone was told to prepare to convince their meeting partner to come around to their side; half of the subjects, however, were told to prepare to make their case to a member of the opposing political party, and half were told to make their case to a member of their own party.

The result: Democrats who were told that a fellow Democrat disagreed with them prepared less well for the discussion than Democrats who were told that a Republican disagreed with them. Republicans showed the same pattern. When disagreement comes from a socially different person, we are prompted to work harder. Diversity jolts us into cognitive action in ways that homogeneity simply does not.

For this reason, diversity appears to lead to higher-quality scientific research.

In 2014, two Harvard University researchers examined the ethnic identity of the authors of 1.5 million scientific papers written between 1985 and 2008 using Thomson Reuters’s Web of Science, a comprehensive database of published research. They found that papers written by diverse groups receive more citations and have higher impact factors than papers written by people from the same ethnic group. Moreover, they found that stronger papers were associated with a greater number of author addresses; geographical diversity, and a larger number of references, is a reflection of more intellectual diversity.

What we believe makes a difference

Diversity is not only about bringing different perspectives to the table. Simply adding social diversity to a group makes people believe that differences of perspective might exist among them and that belief makes people change their behavior.

Members of a homogeneous group rest somewhat assured that they will agree with one another; that they will understand one another’s perspectives and beliefs; that they will be able to easily come to a consensus.

But when members of a group notice that they are socially different from one another, they change their expectations. They anticipate differences of opinion and perspective. They assume they will need to work harder to come to a consensus. This logic helps to explain both the upside and the downside of social diversity: People work harder in diverse environments both cognitively and socially. They might not like it, but the hard work can lead to better outcomes.

In a 2006 study of jury decision making, social psychologist Samuel Sommers of Tufts University found that racially diverse groups exchanged a wider range of information during deliberation about a sexual assault case than all-white groups did. In collaboration with judges and jury administrators in a Michigan courtroom, Sommers conducted mock jury trials with a group of real selected jurors. Although the participants knew the mock jury was a court-sponsored experiment, they did not know that the true purpose of the research was to study the impact of racial diversity on jury decision making.

Sommers composed the six-person juries with either all white jurors or four white and two black jurors. As you might expect, the diverse juries were better at considering case facts, made fewer errors recalling relevant information, and displayed a greater openness to discussing the role of race in the case.

These improvements did not necessarily happen because the black jurors brought new information to the group—they happened because white jurors changed their behavior in the presence of the black jurors. In the presence of diversity, they were more diligent and open-minded.

Consider the following scenario: You are a scientist writing up a section of a paper for presentation at an upcoming conference. You are anticipating some disagreement and potential difficulty communicating because your collaborator is American and you are Chinese. Because of one social distinction, you may focus on other differences between yourself and that person, such as their culture, upbringing and experiences—differences that you would not expect from another Chinese collaborator. How do you prepare for the meeting? In all likelihood, you will work harder on explaining your rationale and anticipating alternatives than you would have otherwise—and you might work harder to reconcile those differences.

This is how diversity works : by promoting hard work and creativity; by encouraging the consideration of alternatives even before any interpersonal interaction takes place. The pain associated with diversity can be thought of as the pain of exercise. You have to push yourself to grow your muscles. The pain, as the old saw goes, produces the gain. In just the same way, we need diversity—in teams, organizations, and society as a whole—if we are to change, grow, and innovate.

This essay was originally published in 2014 by Scientific American. It has been revised and updated to include new research.

About the Author

Katherine W. Phillips

Katherine W. Phillips, Ph.D. , is the Paul Calello Professor of Leadership and Ethics Management at Columbia Business School.

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How Diversity Makes Us Smarter

Being around people who are different from us makes us more creative, more diligent and harder-working

By Katherine W. Phillips

Edel Rodriguez

The first thing to acknowledge about diversity is that it can be difficult. In the U.S., where the dialogue of inclusion is relatively advanced, even the mention of the word “diversity” can lead to anxiety and conflict. Supreme Court justices disagree on the virtues of diversity and the means for achieving it. Corporations spend billions of dollars to attract and manage diversity both internally and externally, yet they still face discrimination lawsuits, and the leadership ranks of the business world remain predominantly white and male.

It is reasonable to ask what good diversity does us. Diversity of expertise confers benefits that are obvious—you would not think of building a new car without engineers, designers and quality-control experts—but what about social diversity? What good comes from diversity of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation? Research has shown that social diversity in a group can cause discomfort, rougher interactions, a lack of trust, greater perceived interpersonal conflict, lower communication, less cohesion, more concern about disrespect, and other problems. So what is the upside?

The fact is that if you want to build teams or organizations capable of innovating, you need diversity. Diversity enhances creativity. It encourages the search for novel information and perspectives, leading to better decision-making and problem-solving. Diversity can improve the bottom line of companies and lead to unfettered discoveries and breakthrough innovations. Even simply being exposed to diversity can change the way you think. This is not just wishful thinking: it is the conclusion I draw from decades of research from organizational scientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists and demographers.

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Information and Innovation

The key to understanding the positive influence of diversity is the concept of informational diversity. When people are brought together to solve problems in groups, they bring different information, opinions and perspectives. This makes obvious sense when we talk about diversity of disciplinary backgrounds—think again of the interdisciplinary team building a car. The same logic applies to social diversity. People who are different from one another in race, gender and other dimensions bring unique information and experiences to bear on the task at hand. A male and a female engineer might have perspectives as different from each other as an engineer and a physicist—and that is a good thing.

Research on large, innovative organizations has shown repeatedly that this is the case. For example, business professors Cristian Dezsö of the University of Maryland and David Gaddis Ross of the University of Florida studied the effect of gender diversity on the top firms in Standard & Poor’s Composite 1500 list, a group designed to reflect the overall U.S. equity market. First, they examined the size and gender composition of firms’ top management teams from 1992 through 2006. Then they looked at the financial performance of the firms. In their words, they found that, on average, “female representation in top management leads to an increase of $42 million in firm value.” They also measured the firms’ “innovation intensity” through the ratio of research and development expenses to assets. They found that companies that prioritized innovation saw greater financial gains when women were part of the top leadership ranks.

Racial diversity can deliver the same kinds of benefits. In a study conducted in 2003, Orlando Richard, now at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and his colleagues surveyed executives at 177 national banks in the U.S., then put together a database comparing financial performance, racial diversity and the emphasis the bank presidents put on innovation. For innovation-focused banks, increases in racial diversity were clearly related to enhanced financial performance.

Evidence for the benefits of diversity can be found well beyond the U.S. In August 2012 a team of researchers at the Credit Suisse Research Institute issued a report in which they examined 2,360 companies globally from 2005 to 2011, looking for a relation between gender diversity on corporate management boards and financial performance. Sure enough, the researchers found that companies with one or more women on the board delivered higher average returns on equity, lower gearing (that is, net debt to equity) and better average growth.

How Diversity Provokes Thought

Large data-set studies have an obvious limitation: they can show only that diversity is correlated with better performance, not that it causes better performance. Research on racial diversity in small groups, however, makes it possible to draw some causal conclusions. Again, the findings are clear: for groups that value innovation and new ideas, diversity helps.

In 2006 Margaret Neale of Stanford University, Gregory Northcraft of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and I set out to examine the impact of racial diversity on small decision-making groups in an experiment where sharing information was a requirement for success. Our subjects were undergraduate students taking business courses at the University of Illinois. We put together three-person groups—some consisting of all white members, others with two white members and one nonwhite member—and had them perform a murder mystery exercise. We made sure that all group members shared a common set of information, but we also gave each member important clues that only he or she knew. To find out who committed the murder, the group members would have to share all the information they collectively possessed during discussion. The groups with racial diversity significantly outperformed the groups with no racial diversity. Being with similar others leads us to think we all hold the same information and share the same perspective. This perspective, which stopped the all-white groups from effectively processing the information, is what hinders creativity and innovation.

Credit: Edel Rodriguez

Other researchers have found similar results. In 2004 Anthony Lising Antonio, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, collaborated with five colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, and other institutions to examine the influence of racial and opinion composition in small group discussions. More than 350 students from three universities participated in the study. Group members were asked to discuss a prevailing social issue (either child labor practices or the death penalty) for 15 minutes. The researchers wrote dissenting opinions and had both Black and white members deliver them to their groups. When a Black person presented a dissenting perspective to a group of white people, the perspective was perceived as more novel and led to broader thinking and consideration of alternatives than when a white person introduced that same dissenting perspective . The lesson: when we hear dissent from someone who is different from us, it provokes more thought than when it comes from someone who looks like us.

This effect is not limited to race. For example, in 2013 professors of management Denise Lewin Loyd of the University of Illinois, Cynthia Wang of Northwestern University, Robert B. Lount, Jr., of the Ohio State University and I asked 186 people whether they identified as a Democrat or a Republican, then had them read a murder mystery and decide who they thought committed the crime. Next, we asked the subjects to prepare for a meeting with another group member by writing an essay communicating their perspective. More important, in all cases, we told the participants that their partner disagreed with their opinion but that they would need to come to an agreement with the other person. Everyone was told to prepare to convince their meeting partner to come around to their side; half of the subjects, however, were told to prepare to make their case to a member of the opposing political party, and half were told to make their case to a member of their own party.

For this reason, diversity appears to lead to higher-quality scientific research. In 2014 Richard Freeman, an economics professor at Harvard University and director of the Science and Engineering Workforce Project at the National Bureau of Economic Research, along with Wei Huang, then a Harvard economics Ph.D. candidate, examined the ethnic identity of the authors of 1.5 million scientific papers written between 1985 and 2008 using Thomson Reuters’s Web of Science, a comprehensive database of published research. They found that papers written by diverse groups receive more citations and have higher impact factors than papers written by people from the same ethnic group. Moreover, they found that stronger papers are associated with greater numbers of not only references but also author addresses—geographical diversity is a reflection of more intellectual diversity.

The Power of Anticipation

Diversity is not only about bringing different perspectives to the table. Simply adding social diversity to a group makes people believe that differences of perspective might exist among them, and that belief makes people change their behavior.

Members of a homogeneous group rest somewhat assured that they will agree with one another, understand one another’s perspectives and beliefs, and be able to easily come to a consensus. But when members of a group notice that they are socially different from one another, they change their expectations. They anticipate differences of opinion and perspective. They assume they will need to work harder to come to a consensus. This logic helps to explain both the upside and the downside of social diversity: people work harder in diverse environments both cognitively and socially. They might not like it, but the hard work can lead to better outcomes.

In a 2006 study of jury decision-making, social psychologist Samuel Sommers of Tufts University found that racially diverse groups exchanged a wider range of information during deliberation about a sexual assault case than all-white groups did. In collaboration with judges and jury administrators in a Michigan courtroom, Sommers conducted mock jury trials with a group of real selected jurors. Although the participants knew the mock jury was a court-sponsored experiment, they did not know that the true purpose of the research was to study the impact of racial diversity on jury decision-making.

Sommers composed the six-person juries with either all white jurors or four white and two Black jurors. As you might expect, the diverse juries were better at considering case facts, made fewer errors recalling relevant information and displayed a greater openness to discussing the role of race in the case. These improvements did not necessarily happen because the Black jurors brought new information to the group—they happened because white jurors changed their behavior in the presence of the Black jurors. In the presence of diversity, they were more diligent and open-minded.

Group Exercise

Consider the following scenario: You are writing up a section of a paper for presentation at an upcoming conference. You are anticipating some disagreement and potential difficulty communicating because your collaborator is American and you are Chinese. Because of one social distinction, you may focus on other differences between yourself and that person, such as their culture, upbringing and experiences—differences that you would not expect from another Chinese collaborator. How do you prepare for the meeting? In all likelihood, you will work harder on explaining your rationale and anticipating alternatives than you would have otherwise.

This is how diversity works: by promoting hard work and creativity; by encouraging the consideration of alternatives even before any interpersonal interaction takes place. The pain associated with diversity can be thought of as the pain of exercise. You have to push yourself to grow your muscles. The pain, as the old saw goes, produces the gain. In just the same way, we need diversity—in teams, organizations and society as a whole—if we are to change, grow and innovate.

Predictors of Interdisciplinary Team Innovation in Higher Education Institutions

Published: 09 September 2023
Volume 49 , pages 113–132, ( 2024 )

Cite this article

Kristina Jaskyte 1 ,
Ashley Hunter 2 &
Anna Claire Mell 2

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Higher education institutions recognize that today’s problems are too complex to be conceptualized by a single discipline and are becoming increasingly committed to interdisciplinary work, as evidenced by the increasing number of interdisciplinary departments, internal funding opportunities, and research centers. Despite the widespread popularity and theorized benefits of interdisciplinary work, there is minimal research on predictors of team innovation of university-based interdisciplinary teams. To fill this gap in the literature, the authors developed and tested a comprehensive model of interdisciplinary team innovation. The results suggest that members of teams that had a shared vision, were task-oriented, and embraced debate, perceived their teams as innovative. Cognitively diverse teams that were task oriented, on the other hand, had higher team innovation performance. Lessons learned from this study are useful for all organizations that engage in interdisciplinary work and those professionals who work or advise interdisciplinary teams.

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Antecedents of Team Learning Distilled from Both Qualitative and Quantitative Research

Innovation in the Knowledge Age: implications for collaborative science

Data availability.

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.

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Jaskyte, K., Hunter, A. & Mell, A.C. Predictors of Interdisciplinary Team Innovation in Higher Education Institutions. Innov High Educ 49 , 113–132 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-023-09676-3

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Neurodiversity

Achieving the power of cognitive diversity, different brains do it better..

Posted September 23, 2023 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

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This post is part two in a series .

Co-authored with Faye Cormick, Ph.D.candidate.

In our previous post , we looked at what cognitive diversity is, why it matters, the neuroscience behind it, and the benefits it brings to the workplace. Here, we explore the barriers to cognitive diversity and how our commitment to embracing it can unlock its full potential.

Overcoming Barriers to Cognitive Diversity

Diverse perspectives offer great value through different ways of thinking, different ways of processing information, and different individual experiences and knowledges, expanding the bandwidth of human problem-solving, decision-making , creativity , and innovation. We know that each brain is unique, based on how they are wired. Breaking down and removing barriers to cognitive diversity sits with each of us. We each have the potential to change our thinking and be open to differences.

Let’s look at some of the barriers that impede our ability to embrace cognitive diversity. One common barrier is our inclination to surround ourselves with individuals who are similar to us, resulting in a homogeneous social circle in which everyone thinks and behaves alike. This makes it difficult to introduce cognitive diversity. To surmount this barrier, we must actively seek opportunities to connect with people from diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. This can be accomplished by attending events and activities that attract a variety of individuals, volunteering with organizations that serve different communities, or simply engaging in conversations with those who have a different perspective than our own.

Another barrier to cognitive diversity in our personal lives is the fear of discomfort or conflict. Conforming with people who have different opinions or worldviews can be challenging, especially if we need to get used to it. However, avoiding these conversations can prevent us from learning and growing. To overcome this barrier, we must practise active listening and empathy, and be willing to engage in respectful dialogue and invite conversation with those who think differently. The barrier is within us, and we can change the way we think about it if we want to. We may not always change each other's minds, but we can gain a deeper understanding of different perspectives and build stronger relationships.

Our unconscious bias is also a barrier. We all have unconscious biases, which can prevent us from seeing the world in a truly diverse and inclusive way. To overcome these biases, we need to engage in self-reflection and actively work to recognize and address them. This can be achieved by engaging with something different or new, being curious, and having an open mind in seeking different perspectives through reading books and articles and reflecting on our experiences and assumptions.

Breaking down barriers to cognitive diversity in the workplace is important, but can be tricky. Like any challenge, the desire to change sits with each of us. Here are a few common obstacles that we might face, and how you can tackle them.

Barrier #1: We often hang out with people who are similar to us, leading to a narrow social circle. You’ve heard phrases such as "like attracts like" and " groupthink ." The irony is expecting a different outcome without doing anything differently.

Solution: Consciously seek out new opportunities to get diverse perspectives. Step out of the “comfort zone” and meet with diverse people, whether it's by attending events, volunteering, or talking with or listening to people who take a different perspective.

Barrier #2: We're all afraid of discomfort or conflict when engaging with people who hold different opinions. All brains are lazy, which is normal, but not always ideal at work in helping us to try something different, or new.

Solution: Practise active listening and empathy, and engage in respectful dialogue with those who think differently. We may not always agree, but we can learn from each other and strengthen relationships.

Barrier #3: We all have brains that have unconscious biases. These prevent us from seeing things from a diverse and inclusive perspective.

Solution: At the end of the day reflect on one conversation. Challenge your own assumptions and actively seek out diverse perspectives to rethink how you think and become open to different perspectives and conversations with yourself.

Barrier #4: Lack of awareness. We may not understand or be aware of what cognitive diversity is. Without awareness, organizations are less likely to pursue and promote cognitive diversity.

Solution: Educate yourself and your workplace through conversations, and by undertaking diversity and inclusion training.

A World of Diversity Is at Your Disposal

Cognitive diversity is a powerful force for innovation, problem-solving, and personal and professional growth. We can achieve greater creativity, better decision-making, enhanced learning, and more inclusive communities by valuing and embracing diverse perspectives.

When we commit to embracing cognitive diversity, we can unlock more of the mind's potential achieve a brighter, more inclusive future. Overcoming barriers requires intention and a deliberate effort by individuals and organizations. By actively seeking diverse perspectives, engaging in respectful dialogue, recognizing and addressing our biases, and educating ourselves, we can create a world that values and celebrates cognitive diversity in all its forms.

The bottom line: Embracing cognitive diversity isn't just a nice-to-have. It's a must-have. By valuing and celebrating diverse perspectives, we can achieve greater inclusion, creativity, and innovation. Cognitive diversity is a case for more is more. Different brains do it better.

Faye Cormick, a Ph.D. candidate, is a certified neuro-coach and an accredited training partner with the International Coaching Federation, Fellow of the Institute of Coaching, and Fellow of the Institute of Organisational Neuroscience.

Paulus, P. B., & Argote, L. (2010). The benefits of cognitive diversity in teams: A meta-analysis of team performance and idea generation studies. Human Performance, 23(2), 169-201.

Chen, K. J., & Salas, E. (2009). The role of cognitive diversity in team learning and performance: A review of empirical research. Human Resource Management Review, 19(2), 99-111.

Williams, L. A., & Chen, K. J. (2012). The downside of cognitive diversity: The effects of conflict and dissatisfaction in teams. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 27(1), 12-28.

Justin James Kennedy, Ph.D., is a professor of applied neuroscience and organisational behaviour at UGSM-Monarch Business School in Switzerland and the author of Brain Re-Boot.

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Why Diversity and Inclusion Are Important for Problem-Solving

Simone Bradley 22 March 2022

Change Management Activate Behavior Change

What happens when we bring in new perspectives? This article explores this and how to activate inclusive problem-solving.

Diversity in our backgrounds equips us with varying mental toolkits. When people with diverse perspectives work inclusively to solve problems, the results are powerful. Take the example of the million-dollar Netflix algorithm challenge :

In 2006, Netflix's CEO, Reed Hastings, announced an open competition to create an algorithm that would predict customers' movie ratings. The algorithm had to be 10% more efficient than Netflix's algorithm, Cinematch. This task was so difficult that Netflix offered a million dollars to anyone who could achieve this. Of course, this competition attracted thousands of participants from various backgrounds – from math majors at an Ivy League university in the US to Austrian computer programmers and even a British psychologist and his daughter! Dry erase markers scribbled across whiteboards, notebooks piled up, and brains were tested. It became clear to contestants that this was not going to be solved by one brilliant individual who had all the answers. Early on, teams realized that the most significant improvements came when individuals combined their results. The secret sauce for the eventual winners (a blended team called BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos) was, in the end, the collaboration between people with diverse perspectives. Finally, in 2009, the top two teams combined forces, combined their algorithms, and surpassed the 10% threshold. What happened in this competition is what Scott E. Page refers to as the " diversity bonus ." Diversity improves problem-solving and increases innovation which leads to better performance and results for your organization. Our objective in this article is to explore the power of diversity in problem-solving and to provide three ways to improve problem-solving in your organization by activating diversity-embracing behaviors in your employees.

The Power of Activating Diversity of Thought

People tend to solve problems by first looking at their own experiences, habits, culture, and understanding. The brain does this to determine whether we have faced a similar situation before and if we know how to solve it. Psychologists refer to this as a " mental set. "

Mental sets save us time and energy in the decision-making process but can hamper our problem-solving abilities. Different perspectives lead to different kinds of solutions. For example, an obvious solution to one person may seem abstract or irrelevant to someone else. The more perspectives you have when analyzing a problem, the more likely you will consider a broader range of solutions. How can you show your employees how to embrace different perspectives in your organization? To activate diversity , you need to create an environment that embraces the different ways individuals think, feel, and act. This is achieved by taking small actions over time to make inclusive behaviors a habit. Below we'll discuss three ways to help your team encourage diversity and inclusion when problem-solving.

1. Make All Voices Count

True diversity and inclusion mean that everyone in your team gets the opportunity to be heard. Sometimes though, we aren't conscious of who doesn't have a voice in a meeting or event. So, in many situations, the opinions of the most assertive people often carry the most weight. On the opposite side, women of color and other marginalized groups often don’t feel empowered to speak up. In your organization, do you currently have a balance between who gets to talk in meetings and who doesn't?

In your next conference call or in-person meeting, take a back seat and mostly observe while still making sure that you participate when called upon.

After your call, reflect on what stood out for you. Also, consider what strategies you can create to ensure that the only time people on your team aren't heard is because they are on mute!

2. Welcome All Ideas

Organizations that embrace diversity solve problems by fostering an environment where all ideas are welcome. Embracing everyone's thoughts gives your team members the freedom to get creative without worrying about someone else's opinion. Don't miss out on your next great idea because someone was too embarrassed to share it. The next time you have a brainstorming session, encourage your team to share their thoughts, no matter how out of the box they are. Afterward, reflect on what happened in the session:

What stood out for you when you encouraged all ideas?
What can you leverage from what you have learned to enable your teams to share their ideas regularly?

3. Normalize Disagreements

A team can only be truly inclusive and allow a wide diversity of thoughts and ideas if it’s possible for members to disagree with each other in an empathetic and considerate way.

Diverse perspectives continue to flow when we normalize disagreements. If your team doesn't have a good strategy for dealing with conflict, only the most forceful personalities will be the ones who get their way.

Prepare yourself and your team for conflict with the following steps:

Don't make it personal
Avoid putting down the other person's ideas and beliefs
Instead of saying "you", use "I" statements to communicate how you feel, what you think, and what you want or need
Listen to the other point of view without interrupting
Avoid absolute statements

Final Thoughts

The Netflix algorithm challenge is a perfect illustration of the importance of diversity in problem-solving. The contestants understood that combining different ideas and perspectives was the only way to progress forward. Likewise, organizations need to take this approach too. In this article, we explored how to activate behavior change in your employees by giving them small actions that they can use to be more inclusive when problem-solving. There are many other steps that organizations can take to embrace diversity.

If you are interested in other ways to activate inclusivity, book a consultation to discuss creating a custom D&I program.

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Cognician’s founding belief is that people are capable of great things when their behavior is driven by meaningful conversations, great questions, powerful ideas, and deeply felt emotions. Our core capability is enabling large organizations to activate behavior change at scale. We achieve this by creating personalized, data-driven digital experiences that are grounded in action, follow-through, reflection, and social engagement. With our multi-day challenges, you can drive measurable change in 30 days or less.

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Cultural diversity drives innovation: empowering teams for success

International Journal of Innovation Science

ISSN : 1757-2223

Article publication date: 22 September 2020

Issue publication date: 1 October 2020

Though there is broad agreement on the beneficial impact of diversity in management and leadership roles, much of the innovative capacity of an organization is realized at the unit level in working teams. Recent research points to cultural diversity having an especially significant impact on innovation team performance. The reports also highlight the need for the optimal team operating principles to derive maximum benefit. To prepare such innovation teams for success, it is valuable to understand the dynamics of team diversity at the project level and the underlying barriers and opportunities presented.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper reviews the literature and case studies on cultural inputs to ideation and innovation, assessing team diversity through readily available instruments and the deployment of the science of team science (SciTS) principles in innovation teams.

The key learnings include the importance of establishing communication standards, SciTS principles, team assessment of thinking styles and the utility of cultural awareness instruments.

Practical implications

Diversity provides a creative advantage for innovation teams. However, team dynamics play an important role in maximizing these advantages, and cross-cultural competence of team members is required. Deployment of appropriate assessment tools and team methodologies enhances the likelihood of successful outcomes including in remote team settings.

Originality/value

Literature from diverse functional areas is summarized including the science of team science, organizational management, diversity and inclusion methodologies and ethnocultural dynamics. It provides pointers for the optimal formation and operating principles with highly culturally diverse teams.

Implementation
Team science

Jones, G. , Chirino Chace, B. and Wright, J. (2020), "Cultural diversity drives innovation: empowering teams for success", International Journal of Innovation Science , Vol. 12 No. 3, pp. 323-343. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJIS-04-2020-0042

Emerald Publishing Limited

Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this license may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

Introduction

Numerous studies confirm the positive impact of diversity at board level, executive leadership and managerial roles in organizations. In the case of innovation, in addition to strategic leadership, one must of course consider the innovation process itself, which typically involves ideators and entrepreneurs from varied backgrounds who work in smaller teams driven by strategic goals ( Nelson, 1991 ). Diversity of thought and approach are naturally assumed to be beneficial to the innovation process, which by its very nature thrives on creative tension and alternating viewpoints. Despite the potential to have a major influence on productivity and impact, relatively few dedicated studies have been reported on the links between diversity and innovation ( Joecks et al. , 2013 ). Factors to consider include, gender, cultural, ethnic, country of origin, geographic location and disciplinary diversity. Studies on gender diversity have modeled the performance impact of uniform, skewed, tilted and balanced groups, often assessed using the Blau index ( Blau, 1977 ). Although not specifically addressing innovative potential, there is overwhelming evidence that gender heterogeneous teams produce higher quality technical and scientific outputs ( Campbell et al. , 2013 ) but concerted engagement is also needed to realize these benefits fully within organizations ( Zheng, 2013 ). One study by the Boston Consulting Group modeled the impact of six components of diversity on innovation team performance (BCG, 2018). Conducted through a survey of >1,700 employees in 8 countries (Austria, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Switzerland and the USA) the study examined perceptions of diversity components at management level (gender, age, the nation of origin, career path, industry background and education). Two features are noteworthy. First, a statistically significant correlation was observed between innovation performance and the diversity of management teams across all six diversity indicators (approximately 20% improvement in innovation revenues). Second, the most pronounced impact driver was the nation of origin of team members ( Table 1 ).

If substantiated, this has potentially far-reaching consequences in the pharmaceutical industry where numerous multinational corporations are headquartered around the globe, and routinely assemble and engage teams (both physically and remotely) from vast and highly diverse populations. The revelation even prompted the quote “for management teams there are few slam dunks in the business world – this is one of them” (BCG, 2018). The cultural dimensions uncovered in this survey have been the subject of other research. In an unrelated study, conducted through a survey of 500 corporate executives one in two respondents believed there exists a positive correlation between cultural diversity and innovation drivers ( Bertelsmann, 2018 ). Despite this admission, some 42% of respondents indicated that their organizations did not focus on hiring diverse workforces. The study goes on to conclude that the more varied an innovation team is in terms of country of origin the greater the impact. The authors ascribe this to employees with diverse backgrounds having specific cultural knowledge, which can be deployed to assess and solve problems in different ways, and they may also have a higher tolerance for taking risks. Caution is also signaled in that different cultural methods of interpretation and values can present challenges in team settings, as there exists the potential for misunderstanding among members. This underscores the importance of studying team dynamics to maximize potential and fully exploit the value of team diversity ( vide infra ). Accordingly, the impetus for assembling this review was to highlight studies, which assess the origins and impact of cultural diversity on innovation team performance, readily available instruments, which assess cultural contributions and tools which can be deployed to optimize team dynamics. Our focus area is on innovation teams and it is of course recognized that corporate innovation is guided by business drivers which may determine the composition, scope and success factors of any given team ( Nelson, 1991 ). Nonetheless, given the significance and implications of the subject matter across various industries (BCG, 2018) it is instructive to examine even in the most general sense.

Power distance index (PDI):

“The extent to which people expect and agree that power should be shared unequally.”

A higher degree signifies hierarchy is clearly established, a lower degree that people question authority.

Individualism vs collectivism (IDV):

“Degree to which society rewards individual versus collective action.”

Higher degrees, individualistic societies, emphasize the “I” versus the “we.”

Uncertainty avoidance (UAI):

“A society’s tolerance for ambiguity.”

A higher degree suggests societies, which opt for stiff codes of behavior, guidelines and laws.

Masculinity vs femininity (MAS):

“Societal preference for achievement, heroism, assertiveness and material rewards for success.”

Its counterpart values cooperation, modesty, caring for the weak and quality of life.

Long-term orientation vs short-term orientation (LTO-STO):

“A societies’ connection of the past with the current and future actions/challenges.”

In high preference, LTO traditions are honored, whereas in STO adaptation is viewed as a necessity.

Indulgence vs restraint (IND):

“Degree of freedom societal norms afford to citizens in fulfilling their human desires.”

In its counterpart, society controls gratification and regulates by means of strict social nor.

Specimen dimensions data are presented for the six most populous nations in the world, plus Switzerland, highlighting the wide scoring ranges typically observed ( Figure 1 ). Implicit within the data are myriad dynamic factors including religious preferences, governmental structures, historical backgrounds, philosophical beliefs, coupled with socio-economic drivers e.g. education, health, poverty, incarceration rates, etc. Obviously, due caution and judgment need to be exercised when viewing such data, as individual choices, behaviors and attitudes that are contrary to those implied by the indices will be expected and stereotypes should be avoided. Additionally, great regional differences can exist within individual countries (e.g. the USA and Switzerland) and even cities (urban v suburban). It is also recognized that nations continually evolve – the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia into culturally distinct countries being a case in point. Moreover, individuals who live in different countries during their formative years would be expected to be influenced by the multiple environments and a single point of reference could be entirely misleading.

There is a negative relationship between power distance and innovation.

There is a negative relationship between uncertainty avoidance and innovation.

There is a positive relationship between individualism and innovation.

There is a negative relationship between masculinity and innovation.

Significantly, H1, H2 and H4 were supported by data regarding patenting intensity. In the case of H3 , though partially supported by data the authors concluded that the impact of family collectivism versus corporate collectivism complicated data sets, precluding a definitive outcome ( Kaasa and Vadi, 2010 ). The authors advance that a reliable link between cultural dimensions and patenting intensity does exist. Obviously, caution needs to be exercised using patents as a surrogate for innovation activity as decisions to pursue are complex undertakings, requiring significant capital investment, often describing inventions a long way prior to market introduction and which in some cases are used defensively ( Martínez-Piva, 2009 ). Nonetheless, they are generally accepted as one of several measures of performance at the so-called “fuzzy front end” of innovation or FFEI ( Gassmann and Schweitzer, 2014 ). Additional studies have examined the impact of culture on innovation ( Herbig and Dunphy, 1998 ), including national ( Shane, 1993 ) and multi-nation studies ( Dakhli and de Clercq, 2004 ), downward trends in cultural differences in Europe ( Gooderham and Nordhaug, 2002 ) and the impact of national networks ( Ahuja, 2000 ). Related work has mapped national culture correlations to two individual components of innovation, namely, the initiation and implementation phases ( Nakata and Sivakumar, 1996 ). For example, the contribution of individualism (ranked high in the USA) to the first, initiation stage of innovation can be understood (ideation and concept testing), as equally can be the value of collectivism (ranked high in Japan) to the second, implementation phase of innovation (product development and launch) which requires concerted, group effort. These studies are insightful, and, coupled with comparative re-assessments between Eastern and Western cultures ( Wu, 2006 ), have allowed researchers to correlate observed contributions to innovation with national propensities ( Smale, 2016 ).

Though understanding the drivers and proclivities of individual contributors is instructive, an obvious challenge lies in managing the dynamics of innovation teams to establish the most creative and productive environment. Studies suggest that published outputs from diverse teams are cited more frequently than from those with less heterogeneity, and the notion that ethnic diversity reflects idea diversity has been advanced ( Freeman and Huang, 2014 ). It has also been suggested that the management of teams with high cultural diversity may warrant special considerations within organizations ( Mannix and Neale, 2005 ). Accordingly, when capitalizing on opportunities imbued by cultural diversity in innovation teams, attention to cultural competence of assembled teams (cultural intelligence (CQ)) should also be studied, alongside traditional evaluative (EQ and IQ) measures.

Cross-cultural competence in innovation teams

Assembling teams who hail from a multitude of diverse cultural backgrounds is a routine occurrence in modern multinational corporations, and especially prevalent in the global pharmaceutical sector. Accordingly, a degree of cross-cultural awareness and competence could be considered a natural advantage to a team member. In addition to working within the team, cross-cultural competence could also be valuable for interactions external to the organization e.g. customers, suppliers, regulators and patients in the myriad markets the team is engaged in ( Ramalu et al. , 2010 ). For these reasons, it is logical that an assembled team considers the cultural awareness and competence (CQ) of its members ( Ang and van Dyne, 2008 ). Such insights could be reasoned to help the team establish itself and function more effectively, and would have added value within innovation teams. Creative tensions are expected and encouraged in such environments, and CQ competence could reduce the likelihood of any ad hominem behaviors by reducing potential misunderstandings and miscommunications which have cultural origins. These cultural touchpoints can range from subtle, interpersonal nuances through to organizational edicts and operating models and team members with experience would be able to mentor and socialize new colleagues. For example, when communicating decisions stemming from teams and units, in certain countries (e.g. India and Japan) they are sometimes pre-socialized in smaller groups to secure buy-in prior to formal announcements, whereas in others (e.g. the USA) external advisors are often engaged to make recommendations which are subsequently announced ( Gibson and Gibbs, 2006 ). Navigating these norms requires due diligence and skill, best gained from exposure to the cultural elements in person or through structured training. Even at the most basic level, conversational styles need to be mindful of cultural norms ( Ang and Van Dyne, 2008 ). For example, in some countries pauses in conversations are deliberate, injected to allow the parties to reflect upon and honor what was just said. Conversely, some cultures seem to promote the rapid exchange of conversational points as a sign of productivity and alignment (the USA is a good example). Accordingly, one needs to be mindful not to unintentionally show disrespect to a person based on the cadence of a conversation ( Fussell and Setlock, 2012 ). As diligent employees will no doubt be mindful of these issues in a global corporation, they can become of special significance for the effective functioning of culturally diverse teams. Another example can be observed in the way different cultures use facial expressions to communicate ( Barrett et al. , 2019 ). While in certain western countries an exaggerated smile may be offered to an individual to express welcoming and project a degree of confidence, in other countries it can be deemed inappropriate ( Coles et al. , 2019 ). Japanese business culture values humility and suppression of emotions to convey trust, and fewer emotions are communicated using the mouth (Stanford, 2016). Smiling at a stranger in other countries can be interpreted as a sign of stupidity, insanity, insincerity or even dishonesty ( Krys et al. , 2016 ). Likewise, the application of direct eye contact can be interpreted as a sign of confidence and respect in some countries whereas in others it can signal disrespect and insubordination, requiring cultural context and awareness ( Uono and Hietanen, 2015 ). In-depth studies have been conducted on the perceptions of facial expressions, including the so-called “Duchenne” smile and apparent disconnects between people’s self-reported degree of happiness and smile tendency ( Gunnery and Hall, 2014 ). It has also been determined that of a possible total of 16,384 possible facial configurations, only 35 are used to transmit emotive information across cultures and within these 8 are dominant in most cultures ( Srinivasan and Martínez, 2018 ). Correlations with the Hofstede cultural dimensions have also been explored. In countries with low scores on the uncertainty avoidance dimension (UAI) non smiling individuals were deemed as more intelligent ( Hareli and Hess, 2010 ), and second, in countries with high corruption indicators, smiling correlated with reduced levels of trust ( Ozono, 2010 ). Another crucial factor for team members relates to communication style ( Figure 2 ). Under the principles outlined by Hall ( Hall, 1977 ), individuals can be categorized as either direct or indirect communicators and there are cultural underpinnings for each ( Gudykunst and Ting-Toomey, 1988 ). Under this framework, direct communicators are seen to operate with a low situational context, with a high emphasis on actual words being spoken irrespective of any possible nuances ( Hall, 1977 ).

Conversely, an indirect communicator will place a high degree of context to the conditions under which words are spoken including tone, body language and what is not said in addition to spoken word ( Clyne et al. , 2009 ). Though most people function as a blend of the two, extreme differences between the two approaches can naturally lead to conflict or misunderstanding in team settings, e.g. where an email communication might be interpreted as blunt or obtuse by one member or straight to the point/not beating about the bush by others ( Management, 2014 ). The more culturally diverse the team, the more important it becomes to understand each member preferred communication styles, to the point of which guidelines may become appropriate ( Mayer and Bello, 2012 ). In an attempt to codify/quantitate our capacity to function effectively in culturally diverse settings, a cultural intelligence index or CQ has been developed ( Van Dyne et al. , 2012 ).

The cultural intelligence four-factor model

Metacognitive CQ, which represents a person’s consciousness and awareness of cultural cues during interactions with people from other cultural backgrounds. It has also been described as representing the processes we use to acquire and understand cultural knowledge.

Acquired through a combination of education and personal experience, cognitive CQ represents our level of competence of the conventions, practices and norms used in different cultural settings. This can include social systems and structures of other cultures and their value systems.

Motivational CQ assesses the level of interest and energy directed toward learning and functioning in situations characterized by cultural differences people with high motivational CQ express confidence in their personal cross-cultural effectiveness.

Behavioral CQ measures peoples’ ability to exhibit appropriate verbal and nonverbal behavior when interacting with people from different cultures. This may include, for example, the use of culturally appropriate words, tones, gestures and facial expressions.

Significantly within the context of this paper, a study of 73 teams with over 327 members revealed that high levels of CQ within multi-cultural teams had a positive benefits, equipping the teams to overcome numerous obstacles and potential barriers ( Moon, 2013 ). A number of scales and assessment modalities have been developed to gauge CQ competence, including the Intercultural Adjustment Potential Scale (ICAPS) ( Matsumoto et al. , 2001 ), the Cultural Intelligence Scale (CQS) and the Intercultural Developmental Inventory (IDI) ( Matsumoto and Hwang, 2013 ). While the IDI is often deployed for individuals engaging on overseas assignments and the ICAPS for individuals in global leadership roles ( Rose et al. , 2010 ), the CQS is seen as a useful assessment for multicultural teams and has been studied globally with different audiences ( Ng et al. , 2009 ). Pioneered by the Cultural Intelligence Center in the USA, the assessment focuses on specific capabilities, namely, CQ drive (motivation), knowledge (cognition), strategy (metacognition) and action (behavior) ( Figure 3 ; SHRM, 2015 ).

Respondents receive an integrated assessment including the four key dimensions, and also personal orientation on a total of 10 culture value dimensions, which are compared against tendencies within the 10 largest cultural cluster groupings recognized globally as illustrated in Table 2 ( Jung, 1933 ; Pittenger, 1993 ). Outputs from the assessment consist of a scoring regimen (0–100 scale) for each of CQ drive, knowledge, strategy and action with 3 or 4 sub-categories in each grouping. A reference scale is provided against worldwide norms for each category and sub-category, recorded as low (bottom 25%), moderate (middle 50%) and high (top 25%). The assessment comes with a workbook allowing respondents to develop and deploy strategies and tactics to address low scoring areas.

The roots of the culture value dimensions used in the CQS assessment instrument have origins in other models, including the PDI, IDV, UAI and LTO indices advanced in the Hofstede analyzes. Though necessarily inexact based on personal circumstances, environment and beliefs, the value dimensions have been mapped against the major cultural clusters into high, medium and low tendencies based on analysis of published studies ( Ng et al. , 2009 ; SHRM, 2015 ). The mere suggestion of potential differences across the dimensions and the purported range of preferences serves to raise awareness of cross-cultural complexities which can factor into team dynamics and signals the importance of CQ knowledge ( Figure 4 ).

The relative contributions of the four CQ dimensions to work-related functions have been investigated and highlight distinct relationships between components. Through consistent patterns, metacognitive CQ and behavioral CQ predict task performance, metacognitive CQ and cognitive CQ predict both cultural judgment and decision-making ability and motivational CQ plus behavioral CQ predict cultural adaptation. Accordingly, CQS assessment would seem particularly useful for members of newly formed culturally diverse teams, and for individuals relocating to a new (cultural) environment ( Ang et al. , 2007 ). More recent studies have attempted to correlate relationships between CQ and individual personality traits ( Lievens et al. , 2003 ). The prevailing taxonomy on human personality is commonly referred to as the “Big Five” model ( Murugesan and Jayavelu, 2017 ).

The big five model of personality

Extraversion (sociable, assertive, ambitious).

Agreeableness (friendly, trusting, cooperative).

Conscientiousness (responsible, organized, dependable).

Emotional stability (control, calm, secure).

Openness to experience (imaginative, inquiring, artistic).

As the Big Five model has been validated across cultures, there is a natural interest in associations between individual factors and the “four factors” of CQ dimensionality. Based on a number of studies in different settings, relationships have been correlated which allow connections between personality and cultural competence to be made ( Ang et al. , 2006 ). Such has far-reaching consequences, given the expanding diversity and mobility of the global workforce and may have special connotations within innovation teams ( Elenkov and Manev , 2008, 2009 ). Research has also been conducted to validate the correlations by studying team coaches ( Devin, 2017 ).

Conscientiousness and metacognitive CQ.

Agreeableness and emotional stability with behavioral CQ.

Extraversion with cognitive, motivational and behavioral CQ.

Openness with all four factors of CQ.

Assessing the composition of teams

The majority of projects conducted in the pharmaceutical industry are through divisional channels with personnel who were hired based on specific skill sets. Teams within these sub-organizations (often called line functions) will be pre-formed and ready to deploy or will assemble then disassemble as needed as projects are identified. Considerable effort has been devoted to our understanding of team dynamics and the contributions of individual members through the assessment of personality traits and modes of engagement. The origins of personality typing date back to the Greco-Roman era with the description of the “four temperaments” by Hippocrates (c.460–c.370 BC). According to this proto-psychological theorem, four medical determinants (sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic temperaments) were assigned as personalities based on the relative prevalence of bodily fluids and the possibility of mixed categories advanced were personality types overlapped ( Merenda, 1987 ). Some 2,300 years later, application of personality classification and typing became of prime importance in the post-industrialized business world where tasks began to involve diverse teams of workers. One of the most widely used assessment tools is the Myers-Briggs type indicator (MBTI) which is designed to highlight specific personality factors, which may influence behavior in a team ( Jung, 1933 ). Based on the theories of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung the instrument provides an assessment of individuals’ preferred stances within team environments, with binary categorization in terms of attitudes ( I ntrovert/ E xtrovert), lifestyle ( J udging/ P erceiving) and functions ( S ensing/ I ntuition and T hinking/ F eeling) ( Pittenger, 1993 ). The various combinations of tetrads (16 total) are assigned monikers which serve as terms of reference for the individual and team members who will interact with the person ( Table 3 ). Of interest to innovation communities, it is suggested that Apple CEO Steve Jobs was an ENTJ (“Field Marshall”), Albert Einstein INTP (“Architect”) and Thomas Edison an ENTP (“Inventor”).

In terms of diversity elements, based on an analysis in >30 countries all of the type preferences (E/I, S/N, T/F and J/P) have been observed in each culture studied, however, distribution of the 16 types differ across cultures but retain patterns within these cultures. Across all cultures, (X)STJ is the predominant triad and men in each culture typically respond for T (c.f. F) at rates ranging from 10–25% higher than for female respondents ( Seegmiller and Epperson, 1987 ). Jung’s work also extended to the related DISC assessment tool, which scrutinizes four areas of behavior, namely, D ominance (in approach to problem-solving), I nfluence (approach to people), S teadiness (pace and attitude to change) and C ompliance (procedures, standards) ( Jones and Hartley, 2013 ).

Another popular assessment tool is the team roles system introduced by Belbin (2010) . The instrument is derived from analysis of clusters of behaviors and skills that are required to produce team results and is embodied in a total of nine teams “roles” which stem from three centricities, namely, thinking, action and people-oriented ( Table 4 ).

Belbin role assessment allows team members to identify their preferred roles in a team and also uncover inherent strengths, which they may be unaware of. Though no concrete correlations between the MBTI and Belbin system are evident, the use of the former to gain insight to personality factors and the latter for behavioral pointers has been advocated for effective team building ( Higgs, 1996 ). Although the Belbin and MBTI assessments provide useful pointers for the assembly and successful working of cross-functional teams, for innovation-centric programs the Four Sight Thinking Profile has gained popularity. Its basis is that four fundamental forms of thinking roles are used in creative processes (clarification, ideation, development and implementation) and the relative preferences for each allow categorization for team building ( Bratsberg, 2012 ). Team members develop a chart, plotting high and low preferences for each of the four categories, providing a holistic view on preferences and proclivities that the individual and team can use ( Figure 5 ). For individuals with a single high preference (against statistical means), they are assigned a designation from one of the four categories. Individuals with two or three high preferences are designated into sub-categories and were equivalent in all four categories, as an integrator ( Figure 6 ).

Similarly to other evaluative instruments, the Four Sight program provides participants guidance on the best mode of interaction with colleagues in each of the 15 possible categories, which can be pivotal for team building. For example, it is suggested that ideators who are often regarded as “spontaneous,” “imaginative” and “adventurous” should be afforded “constant stimulation,” “variety and change” and “scope to dream” by other teams members. Equally importantly, the instrument points to areas where ideators may cause friction for the team e.g. by drawing attention to themselves, being impatient or too abstract, allowing them to modify their approach. The utility of the instrument for innovation teams is underscored by the fact that two of the preferences (ideator, implementer) map directly to the two phases of innovation (initiation, implementation). In terms of relationships with other assessment tools, the communicating author recorded high preference as a driver under Four Sight, typed as ENTJ ( Field Marshall ) with Myers-Briggs and shaper with Belbin, suggesting action-oriented roles in all three.

While MBTI, Belbin and Four Sight represent assessment tools useful for team assembly and functioning, some other more reflective team profiles have also been advanced including the 9 innovation team personality types articulated by the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation ( Figure 7 ) ( Van Wulfen, 2009 ). It is easy to recognize and identify with some of these characters, and many will map onto Belbin and MBTI profiles readily. In a similar vein and with a degree of comedic interpretation (inspired by characters in a children’s book series), in their award-winning innovation text The Corporate Startup , Viki, Toma and Gons identify eight innovation characters/caricatures which allow people to relate to Viki et al. (2017) . Though certain team members may naturally exude one such persona it is also an interesting proposition to have team members deliberately adopt one for the purposes of role-play discussion or order that all viewpoints represented by the characters are articulated and appreciated.

No discussion of team roles would be complete without mention of de Bono’s six hats ( Table 5 ). The so-called six thinking hats model is a tool to promote parallel then lateral thinking in groups and teams. Each imaginary hat ascribes a designated mindset of an individual, and discussions are choreographed by the wearer of the blue hat, who is the group/team controller ( Kivunja, 2015 ). On socializing the particular topic for discussion, the white hat bearer seeks to clarify information, the red hat bearer delivers an emotional response, the yellow hat bearer positive elements, the black hat bearer cautions and concerns and the green hat bearer creative opportunities. This can be an effective tool for entire teams to adopt a single hat/thinking mode (with the exception of blue which is singular) to align on parallel thinking and then be assigned assorted hats for lateral thinking. The added benefit of this approach is that if conducted with random assignments, individuals may be forced to act outside their comfort zones, promoting personal growth and empathy for team members with differing natural preferences.

The science of developing diverse innovation teams: the science of team science

Forming : The team is established using either a top-down or bottom-up approach.

Storming: Team members establish roles and responsibilities. This can often be the onset of turf battles as persons from diverse backgrounds exchange views through a combination of dialog and debate. If the pressure to reach consensus prematurely is avoided, this phase can be particularly creative as the full team is more likely to input.

Norming: Team members begin to work together effectively and efficiently, start to develop trust and comfort with one another and learn they can rely on each other.

Performing: The team works together seamlessly, focuses on a shared goal and efficiently resolves issues or problems that emerge.

Teams may come to a natural end. The team’s dissolution should be celebrated and the accomplishments recognized and rewarded.

The team may take on a new project with a new goal, applying its ability to work together to solve a new problem.

Absence of trust.

Fear of conflict.

Lack of commitment.

Avoidance of accountability.

Inattention to results.

Within these, fear of conflict is often seen as the most pervasive and insurmountable issue. On any challenging project, the team will be continually exchanging viewpoints from differing perspectives and vulnerability and trust are key issues that need to be addressed. Individuals have widely differing approaches to conflict resolution, and the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument was developed to help team members identify their most natural style. The five styles categorized are, namely, competing, accommodating, avoiding, collaborating and compromising ( Thomas and Kilmann, 1974 ). Another key success factor for teams is to understand and navigate the boundaries of dialog and debating schemas ( Table 6 ). As articulated by Berman, very different drivers are associated with each and recognizing these behaviors upfront can allow a team to steer clear of potential conflict forming activities ( Berman et al. , 1997 ). Collectively, these SciTS learnings have been found to be equally applicable from fundamental through to translational research and have become recommended reading for any cross-functional and/or diverse team ( NIH, 2010 ).

Equipping innovation teams for success

The process of innovation has been described using a variety of terms, but within the context of the pharmaceutical industry, we refer to the ideation, design, initiation and subsequent implementation of novel scientific and technological approaches for the development of new products. Innovation within the industry is typically confined to a restricted number of products, which vary from company to company based on expertise, therapeutic areas and collaborative agreements and the products themselves can be either branded or generic. In the strictest sense, it has been argued that the business does not routinely engage in white space or open innovation and instead largely innovate in areas of competence and familiarity ( Nelson, 1991 ). However, from time to time there are groundbreaking advances that open new avenues in health-care and disrupt the industry e.g. life-saving gene therapies, CAR-T immunotherapies and drug-free all digital therapies which were introduced in the past few years alone. What is well understood within organizations, however, is that competition is ever-present and the discovery, production and management of new medications represents a global challenge that requires continuous forms of innovation throughout the organization. For this reason, organizations study the structure, formation, operation and performance of teams very closely to derive maximum benefit. Measuring the outputs of innovation within a team can sometimes be challenging given the incubation period for marketed products can often exceed a decade, by which time a team’s composition will have changed many times. Another more focused approach to innovation within the industry can be to deliberately establish designated innovation teams assigned to tackle specific problems rapidly. In this case, there is a degree of control that can be exerted in the selection of the team, and it is commonly recognized that the diversity of the team (across multiple dimensions) leads to myriad benefits. Fortunately, the modern global pharmaceutical industry is blessed with a highly diverse workforce, making individual team diversity a routine expectation. Our interest and motivation behind the writing of this review are to begin to understand how aspects of team diversity benefit innovation teams. In this context we refer to teams, which have been assembled to execute on a project within a fixed time period, and where the expected outputs will include generation of new knowledge, reducing to practice a new process or product or development of proprietary principles. In each case, a metric could be a generation of a patentable idea, trade secret or publishable concept related to a product intended to enter the marketplace. The recent reports on the correlation between a team’s cultural diversity and higher innovation performance (BCG, 2018; Bertelsmann, 2018 ; Kaasa and Vadi, 2010 ) are intriguing and are readily relatable. Teams composed of members from diverse backgrounds may approach problems from different perspectives and have different tolerances for risk-taking, both of which are essential attributes needed in creative, innovative teams. A corollary exists, however, in that the more diverse the team, the more potential for culturally inspired misunderstandings to occur, which may be exacerbated under conditions where creative tensions are heightened and time constraints are omnipresent. Accordingly, it is likely that a study of dynamics and operating principles can benefit the entire team, and thus forms a substantial component of this review. Equally importantly, many scientists and engineers will be unaware of the cultural origins of different decision-making processes or communication preferences which over time might be detrimental to the team. For teams established over a long period, it could be expected that members learn each other’s preferences, proclivities and idiosyncrasies which attenuates the potential for conflict. In contrast, a freshly formed culturally diverse (innovation) team might need to adapt very quickly, underscoring the need for active assessment and coaching during the onboarding process.

Many of the excellent tools and approaches described herein can provide key learnings for teams and offer unique perspectives tailored to individual circumstances. Through a series of systematic evaluations of the tools and instruments described herein, our internal innovation program selected the CQS assessment, FourSight preference and SciTS framework for deployment in innovation teams ( Jones et al. , 2020 ). They are being made available to all newly formed teams, actively supported by coaches who are versed in deploying their learnings in mentoring activities and initial results are encouraging ( Jones et al. , 2020 ). The formation and normalizing of an innovation team represent two important phases in its development, but it is also imperative that the team’s operating principles are appropriate. For any innovation team, openness, trust, candor and psychological safety are pre-requisites for success and to monitor the health of the team an anonymous/confidential scorecard tool is advocated ( Figure 8 ). Adapted from SciTS principles, this is used to record progress or signal advanced warnings at specific intervals during the project, allowing intervention by the assigned coach if necessary ( Jones et al. , 2020 ). Aggregate analyzes from these surveys (issued with regular frequency) are shared with teams with emphasis placed on driving to full inclusivity for all team members. We believe with these guidance teams have the maximum chances of success and a framework is in place to monitor impact over extended periods and multiple cycles. We intend to report the long term findings and implications from these studies in due course ( Jones et al. , 2020 ).

Conclusions and implications

A considerable body of literature supports the notion that cultural diversity in teams correlates with improved innovation performance. Creative tensions in these teams need to be managed appropriately and numerous excellent instruments and strategies are available to leaders. Ideally, these should include cultural assessment (awareness and competence), team dynamics (individual and team integration) and inclusive and transparent operating principles grounded in team science methodology. Systematic analysis using appropriately powered studies and controls will ultimately help quantitate the impact of various components in innovation teams and across programs, although initial observations from our internal innovation program are encouraging ( Jones et al. , 2020 ). Such learnings could then be used to inform and guide team development and ultimately allow correlation of diversity elements with predictive outcome metrics. The high levels of cultural diversity in the global pharmaceutical industry make it ideally suited to study these key topics. Another principle to study is whether the behaviors learned in diverse innovation teams are then transferred to new teams that the individuals participate in. Equally interesting is to study whether diverse, established teams diminish their innovative capacity over time due to a normalization process. This could lead to the concept of regular rotations through different teams helping maximize the impact and learnings. With the steady globalization of industries and the increasingly diverse workforce, studies of this nature can play an important role in the success of innovation programs. Scientists, engineers and technologists may seldom read the social science or management literature, but the availability of intuitive tools and instruments to empower their teams to success will ensure continual progress is made. Finally, successful adaptation to remote working conditions mandated by social distancing requires consideration of intra- and inter-team dynamics and the learnings can provide additional benefit for innovation teams operating virtually for extended periods.

Cultural Dimension maps for the six most populous nations plus Switzerland

Cultural Relationships to Communication Preferences proposed by Hall ( 1977 )

Components of the CQS Profile developed by the Cultural Intelligence Center

A total of 10 culture value dimensions used in CQS assessment

Specimen Four Sight thinking preferences plot

The 15 Four Sight Thinking Profiles

Hypothetical Team Characters from the Mayo Clinic CFI (left) and The Corporate Startup (right)

Team Performance and Inclusivity Tracking Tool

% Leadership team appointments needed to effect a 1% increase in innovation revenue

Leaders with diverse educational backgrounds	>3%
Diversity based on age	>3%
Externally hired managers from different career paths	3%
Appointment of female managers	2.5%
Appointing managers with experience from different industries	2%
Appointing managers from diverse nations of origin	1.5%

The 10 largest cultural groupings globally

Grouping	Code	Representative nations
Anglo		Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK and USA
Arab		Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and UAE
Confucian Asia		China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan
Eastern Europe		Albania, Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Mongolia, Poland and Russia
Germanic Europe		Austria, Belgium, Germany and The Netherlands
Latin America		Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica and Mexico
Latin Europe		France, French-speaking Canada, Italy, Portugal and Spain
Nordic Europe		Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden
Sub-Saharan Africa		Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, Zambia and Zimbabwe
Southern Asia		India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand

The 16 Myers-Briggs type indicators

ESTP	ESTJ	ISTJ	ISTP
Promoter	Supervisor	Inspector	Crafter

Inventor	Field Marshall	Mastermind	Architect

Champion	Teacher	Counselor	Healer

Performer	Provider	Protector	Composer

The nine Belbin team roles

Thinking centric	Action centric	People centric
Plant	Shaper	Coordinator
Monitor evaluator	Implementer	Team worker
Specialist	Completer finisher	Resource investigator

The six hats of de Bono

Blue –	White –	Red –
Black –	Yellow –	Green –

The dialog and debating schemas articulated by Berman (Berman et al. , 1977)

Dialog	Principles	Debate
- Collaborative	- Characteristics	- Oppositional
- Common ground and consensus	- Search goals	- Differences and weaknesses
- Open minded	- Attitudes	- Closed minded
- Understanding, meaning and agreement	- Listening goals	- Flaws and possible counter arguments
- Potential for strength	- Value of other positions	- Source of flaws and weaknesses
- Can be probed to identify conflict	- Value of assumptions	- To be defended unquestionably
- Potential to refine	- Value of solutions	- Defended to exclusion of all others
- Concern for other party, ally	- Engagement mode	- Countering without personal regard

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Elena Rodriguez, Anastacia Awad, Ivonna Demme, Nancy Long, Christian Pihlgren, Unmesh Deodhar, Rahul Sharma and Clara Fernandez de Castro for inputs on the manuscript.

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In the business world, it has long been believed that diversity brings perspectives that accelerate problem solving and boost profits. But those who diversify these organizations still struggle to climb the corporate ladder. One explanation for this so-called “diversity-innovation paradox” is that the innovations they introduce are devalued when it comes to decisions about hiring and promotion.

A new study by Stanford researchers offers extensive evidence of the same dynamic playing out in academia. Women and racial minorities introduce scientific novelty at higher rates than white men across all disciplines, the analysis shows, but they are less likely to benefit — either through sought-after faculty jobs or respected research careers.

“We’ve been implicitly aware of these types of biases in academia, but to see it in the data is quite troublesome,” said Bas Hofstra, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE), who led the study with GSE Professor Daniel McFarland .

The findings were published April 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . The study’s other co-authors are Vivek Kulkarni, a postdoctoral scholar in computer science at Stanford; Stanford doctoral students Sebastian Munoz-Najar Galvez and Bryan He; and Dan Jurafsky, a professor of linguistics and computer science at Stanford.

Here, Hofstra discusses the link between diversity and innovation in scientific research and what can be done to address bias against women and minority researchers.

Why is diversity important to scientific research?

In any science—and, by that, I mean every academic subject, from comparative literature to chemistry—different viewpoints and problem-solving approaches are critical. Members of underrepresented groups that diversify organizations approach challenges from distinct vantages, which means they bring fresh perspectives that can lead to creative solutions.

Innovators in science are trailblazers, so it’s reasonable to conclude that innovation is also predictive of successful careers. We wanted to find out if there’s a link between the low numbers of women and racial minorities who hold professorships and have research careers and the rates at which they innovate.

We went into this thinking there are two possibilities. One is that underrepresented genders and races, mostly women and racial minorities, innovate less. Another possibility is that diversity does breed innovation, but that diverse perspectives and ideas aren’t rewarded. Our evidence suggests it’s the latter.

Why do you think this happens?

GSE postdoctoral fellow Bas Hofstra

The scientific novelty that underrepresented genders and races introduce gets devalued and discounted. We think it has to do with social structures and the dominant role of majority groups—in most cases, white men—in how scientific problems are framed and understood. Science is a communal effort, and it conforms to the pattern of its social structure.

It’s also possible that the fresh perspectives that women and nonwhite scholars bring are atypical and can sometimes be hard to grasp, so they get devalued by the majority.

How were you able to generate this evidence?

We analyzed a dataset of nearly all completed PhD theses in the United States between 1977 to 2015. That’s nearly 1.2 million dissertations. We inferred the students’ gender and race by matching this data to U.S. Census and Social Security Administration data. We also looked at how many were still publishing research five years later. For those who had graduated a PhD as a primary adviser in that time, we assumed they were tenured faculty at a respectable institution.

The complex part was identifying who introduced novel conceptual links and, of those, which ones proved over time to be influential in their field. We opt for ‘novelty’ over ‘innovation’ in the paper because there is an important difference between the two.

What’s the distinction between them?

Innovation is defined as something that is new and that people use often—but what is used often is perhaps decided by the majority, so it’s not necessarily innovative. If you think about Google Scholar citations, people will often evaluate researchers based on how often their work gets cited by others. But citations can underrepresent certain disciplines or can have a perpetuating effect in that the strong get stronger.

People who connect ideas in new ways introduce novelty, which is not necessarily innovation. Novelty is basically a prerequisite for innovation.

So, how did you identify novelty in the researchers’ work?

Basically, we looked at topics listed in dissertation abstracts and identified what appear to be substantively important concepts while ruling out a lot of noise. We wound up with concepts like ‘HIV’ or ‘social capital’ or the name of a chemical compound.

Once we had all the substantively important concepts from the texts, we started to identify the students who were able to connect them in novel ways. But we also wanted to measure which novel concepts had impact in their respective fields. To do that, we studied how often they were adopted in subsequent PhD dissertations.

For example, Lilian Bruch, a pioneer in HIV research, first linked monkeys to the virus in her 1987 doctoral thesis. Forty-seven PhD dissertations later adopted her conceptual link. That might not sound like a lot, but uptake of her novelty was nearly 70 times higher than the average.

What can researchers and leaders in academia do in response to your findings?

The first step to addressing bias and discrimination in academia is knowing when and where it occurs. The fact that we now have the data showing this is really exciting. So, awareness is key. We also need to be vigilant — to continuously evaluate and address biases in faculty hiring, grant writing and research evaluation.

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J Infect Dis

The Science and Value of Diversity: Closing the Gaps in Our Understanding of Inclusion and Diversity

Talia h swartz.

1 Department of Medicine, New York, New York

2 Department of Medical Education, New York, New York

3 Medical Scientist Training Program, New York, New York

Ann-Gel S Palermo

4 Office for Diversity and Inclusion in Biomedical Education, New York, New York

Sandra K Masur

5 Department of Ophthalmology, New York, New York

6 Office for Women’s Careers, and, New York, New York

Judith A Aberg

7 Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York

Diversity drives excellence. Diversity enhances innovation in biomedical sciences and, as it relates to novel findings and treatment of diverse populations, in the field of infectious diseases. There are many obstacles to achieving diversity in the biomedical workforce, which create challenges at the levels of recruitment, retention, education, and promotion of individuals. Here we present the challenges, opportunities, and suggestions for the field, institutions, and individuals to adopt in mitigating bias and achieving greater levels of equity, representation, and excellence in clinical practice and research. Our findings provide optimism for a bright future of fair and collaborative approaches that will enhance the power of our biomedical workforce.

Diversity enhances excellence and innovation. Including diverse individuals who are also different thinkers because of their lived experiences can increase the breadth and depth of biomedical and clinical inquiries to improve the scope and approach to problems that affect all corners of society. Our goal should be to foster a culture of prioritizing and sustaining diversity at all levels of the biomedical workforce, including the trainee pipeline, trainees, faculty, institutional leadership, committees, national organizations, and government. This article addresses the values of diversity, the data on inclusion and diversity in science, and approaches to improve our effort to foster this diversity.

Here we present data on the benefits of diversity to science and medicine, an extensive list of references on the gaps and paradigms for practices, and specific guidance on how institutions and individuals can promote diversity in their realms. Those who prefer the actionable guidance may read the section “What Are Ways That Our Field Can Foster a Culture of Diversity?”

WHY IS DIVERSITY BENEFICIAL TO SCIENCE?

“Diversity—defined as differences in how we see the world, how we think about the world, how we try and solve problems, the analogies we use, the metaphors, the tools we acquire, the life experiences we have—makes us better at what we do.” Scott E. Page, Robert L. Harris, Jr, ADVANCEments in Science Lecture, Cornell University, 22 April 2015

Diversity has many facets, including background, age, gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, culture, religion, geography, disability, socioeconomic status, area of expertise, level of experience, thinking style, and skill set. The benefits of engaging individuals with a wide swath of perspectives have great potential to improve our capacity to innovate. Why? Overwhelming evidence suggests that teams that include different kinds of thinkers outperform homogeneous groups on complex tasks, including improved problem solving, increased innovation, and more-accurate predictions—all of which lead to better performance and results when a diverse team is tasked to approach a given problem [ 1–3 ]. Diverse and inclusive scientific teams can generate new research questions that have yet to be asked by our field, develop methodical and analytical approaches to better understand study populations, and offer approaches to problem solving from multiple and different perspectives. Diverse groups published higher numbers of articles, and these receive more citations per article [ 4 ].

Diverse Groups Publish More Frequently and Are Cited More

A study from 2013 indicated that articles published from the United States and the United Kingdom that included an international author had a significant increase in citations over articles with authors from the same country [ 4 ]. Using surname as a proxy for ethnicity, a 2014 analysis showed that articles with 4 or 5 authors of different ethnicities had 5%–10% more citations than articles with all authors of the same ethnicity [ 2 ]. To probe the patterns of diversity driving collaborative work, AlSheblie, Rahwan, and Woon queried the scholarly database Microsoft Academic Graph [ 3 ]. They ascribed impact to particular papers published between 1958 and 2009, based on 5-year citation counts, and found that increased diversity with regard to ethnicity, age, gender, and affiliation was associated with increased 5-year citation count, with ethnic diversity having the greatest impact.

Diverse Groups Can Have Complementary Skill Sets

The Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) in Japan instituted a mandate that 50% of all researchers be from outside Japan. In 2012, the institute began recruiting from 6 continents and, by 2018, rose in a ranking of academic institutions in Japan based on research output. The recruitment efforts were broad, recognizing diversity of ethnicity, gender, academic background, and field of interest [ 5 ]. Mukhles Sowwan was a researcher from Jerusalem who came to OIST and recruited 10 scientists from around the world. He made 2 broad generalizations about scientific approaches, based on country of origin: researchers from large world-class universities tend to have a more global perspective, while those from countries with less developed infrastructure tend to be more detail oriented. Working together, individuals with both perspectives can complement each other and inform new approaches.

Diverse Groups Are Better Equipped to Address Health Disparities

Diverse and different thinkers can, as physicians and scientists, impact the outer boundaries of healthcare inequity by allowing their practice and research to be informed by broader social contemporary issues [ 6 , 7 ]. Diverse clinical and scientific teams may be better at addressing the disparities in health outcomes observed among patients of certain racial and ethnic groups. They may be able to do so because they are interested in examining the role that nonscientific factors have in health and well being, such as adverse social determinants of health. Thus, diverse teams in academic medicine can contribute to improving the educational infrastructure to provide robust and meaningful content on diverse patient populations and biomedical problems to equip physicians with relevant knowledge to better take care of patients and begin to undo health-outcome disparities. The recruitment of diverse teams to tackle these problems can result in higher quality and meaningful clinical studies that benefit greater numbers of patients [ 8 ].

Intersectionality Allows Us to Highlight and Enrich Our Overlapping Identities

Diversity is complex at the individual or group level when intersectionality is recognized. Intersectionality is the interconnected nature of social categories, such as race, class, disability, and gender, as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage. Valuing intersectionality in the training, development, retention, and design of scientific teams can enrich the work of research because it is informed by rich and complex heterogeneity in thinking and practice [ 6 ].

WHAT ARE THE BARRIERS TO INCREASING DIVERSITY?

Moving through the educational pipeline is a challenge for underrepresented applicants.

The educational pipeline poses a challenge for underrepresented students who may not have had sufficient educational exposure or support. Many have to overcome significant barriers to access education. Understanding these obstacles should help medical and biomedical graduate schools develop improved recruitment and retention programs and take an active role in promotion and outreach initiatives. Institutions should not assume that reputation alone is sufficient to recruit the top candidates among applicants from underrepresented groups. It is possible that perceived institutional culture may dissuade applicants of certain backgrounds. Outreach efforts can enforce a commitment to fostering diversity [ 8 , 9 ]. Individuals from underrepresented groups may not have had access to the same resources while growing up as those from other backgrounds, who may have received advice in how to improve their curriculum vitae (CV), application, and test-taking and interview skills [ 10 ]. When students from underrepresented groups matriculate, many may experience imposter syndrome, in which an individual doubts their own achievements and fear being perceived as a fraud. This perpetuates feelings of inadequacy and isolation [ 11 ]. Stereotype threat occurs when individuals feel pressure to conform to preconceived notions about their identity. Many of these circumstances can lead to choices in subspecialty later in training, resulting in lower rates of application to various residency programs and fellowships among students from underrepresented groups [ 12 ]. The choice of advanced training relates to numerous factors, including lifestyle, competitive prerequisite requirements, and level of debt [ 13 ].

Individuals on Selection Committees May Have Biases of Which They Are Unaware

Unconscious (implicit) bias is the automatic impact of attitudes or stereotypes on our on our view of the world, actions, and decisions without our awareness [ 14 ]. Unconscious bias affects judgment and can pose a critical barrier to the recruitment and retention of a diverse biomedical workforce. We all have biases. It is important that we learn them and recognize them in our daily decision-making. The Implicit Association Test [ 15 ] is a good way to gauge individual biases because it measures the automaticity with which our brain makes associations. Biases can impact our perceived competence of applicants, even in the dearth of objective information. A nationwide study of science professors evaluated the application from a female and a male undergraduate student for a laboratory manager position in which the same CV was presented but the applicant’s name was different [ 16 ]. All found the female applicant to be more likeable, less competent, and less hirable than the male applicant, and the female candidate was offered a lower annual salary (by nearly $4000) and less mentoring than the male candidate. Another study found that letters of recommendation for medical school applications had coded language that differed between female and male applicants, including longer reference letters and more references to the applicant’s CV, publications, patients, and colleagues for men, and shorter reference letters, including more “doubt-raising items,” such as irrelevant information and nondefinitive statements, and more references the applicant’s personal life [ 17 ]. Bias can also impact on peer review. Scientists from underrepresented groups receive fewer National Institutes of Health (NIH) awards [ 18 ]. Bias can also lead to trainees, faculty, and staff feeling marginalized and not able to reach their full potential and to disparities in awards and promotions. Selection committees may not be sufficiently diverse to represent the need for recruitment of diverse trainees [ 18–20 ]. Availability bias is the human tendency to think of examples that come to mind readily and may explain why underrepresented individuals are less likely to be selected as speakers, nominated for awards, or recommended for committees [ 21–23 ].

Criteria for Admissions Can Disproportionately Disadvantage Applicants From Educationally and Economically Disadvantaged Backgrounds

Successful outcomes on standardized tests are associated with early exposure to standardized examinations and having access to test-preparation resources to develop a test-taking mind-set. Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds perform worse on standardized tests than other students, and this creates a disadvantage for these students as applicants to graduate and professional education programs. Institutional pressures to maintain status in national rankings may increase their emphasis on standardized testing and may disadvantage students from underrepresented backgrounds; emphasizing a holistic review can yield a more diverse group of incoming students [ 18 , 24 ].

Medical School Curricula Can Be Based on Old Paradigms That Fail to Address Diverse Populations

Traditional medical schools have failed to address such topics as cross-cultural patient-physician interactions, health disparities, and actionable strategies to improve health outcomes for underserved communities [ 25 ]. Furthermore, physiological and genomic paradigms are based on antiquated concepts and often do not represent the patient populations for which physicians will need to care. This is an important area for medical students to reorient to the current needs of disadvantaged patient populations. In addition, evaluative measures during training may be based on subjective measures, leading to bias, rather than on objective measures and competency-based assessments. This can result in great heterogeneity in evaluations and can disadvantage introverted students whose knowledge or skill set may be less evident than that of students who are more extroverted and promote their capabilities [ 26 ]. Based on these subjective criteria, underrepresented students are less likely to be represented in the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society [ 26 ].

Individuals With Disabilities Are Underrepresented in the Academic Medicine Workforce

While almost 20% of the United States population has a disability, a small percentage (only 2.7%) of medical students disclose that they have disabilities [ 27 ]. Individuals with disabilities are at risk for health disparities because healthcare professionals may lack appropriate understanding about the impact of disability on health. Physician education emphasizes a patient’s impairment, rather than actionable approaches to break down barriers and improve a patient’s capabilities. Medical trainees with disabilities should be supported in their desire to conduct research on individuals with disabilities, if this is their area of interest. Physicians with disabilities may be more likely to identify and encounter the structural barriers faced by disabled patients, which include policies, practices, accommodations, support, and technical standards that inhibit the achievement of better care for individuals like themselves.

Salary Discrepancies Disadvantage Physicians From Underrepresented Groups

It is well known that there are salary discrepancies across disciplines [ 27–29 ]. Women, physicians from underrepresented groups, and international physicians are disproportionately affected by this. Some cite unsubstantiated excuses, such as the claim that women have personal and social obligations that take time away from their professional obligations. Unmentored individuals may not negotiate well for salary. Salaries for researchers are further lower than those for clinicians, which disincentivizes individuals from pursuing research when clinical work can yield greater reimbursements or financial rewards [ 30 ]. The magnitude of the salary discrepancy between men and women is greater for women with multiple intersectional identities, such as nonwhite race/ethnicity, graduation from an international medical school, and identification as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ), given the overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage each identity brings. A cross-field survey of 65 000 US physicians found that women are paid significantly less across geographic regions and medical disciplines, even when controlled for work hours, age, and other potential contributors [ 31 ]. Among the lowest-salaried fields were pediatric subspecialties, with pediatric infectious diseases (median annual salary, $186 000) at the bottom. Adult infectious diseases physicians were ranked 18th among the 24 lowest compensated subspecialties. Non–US-trained physicians earned 2.5% less than US-trained physicians [ 32 ]. The low salary for infectious diseases physicians poses a barrier to promising graduates pursuing this field after completion of residency [ 28 , 30 , 31 ]. Within the field of infectious diseases, only 7% of trainees and 4% of Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) members are African American. Similarly, only 12% of trainees and 8% of IDSA members are Hispanic [ 27 , 31 ]. Trotman et al performed the largest survey of infectious diseases physicians and found that African American infectious diseases physicians were paid 7%–13% less than those from most other racial/ethnic groups [ 33 ]. Marcelin et al described more-detailed information on gender, racial, and ethnic salary disparities [ 34 ] and cited Aberg et al, who called for concerted efforts to “to establish a diversity and inclusion committee to generate the data necessary for developing a strategic plan to improve the diversity of our workforce and eliminate disparities” [ 32 ].

The Pipeline of Academic Medicine Is Leaky for Underrepresented Groups

Despite great effort to expand diversity in the biomedical workforce over the past several decades, individuals from underrepresented groups advance in careers at substantially lower rates. Although women are receiving over half of PhD degrees in the United States, they only make up 38% of full-time faculty and of that number, only 22% of tenured full-time professors are women, only 16% are deans, and only 15% are department chairs [ 35 ]. The lack of diversity among leadership makes it difficult to cultivate the careers of individuals who cannot find appropriate role models. Numerous sociocultural factors influence this including perpetual and unconscious bias that affects retention and incentives of underrepresented faculty, challenging work-life policies that preclude life events at early stages after training and creating a sense of isolation [ 36 ]. Timing of life events with critical career development milestones can disproportionately disadvantage women of childbearing age. Female and underrepresented scientists are less likely to hold NIH funding and academic leadership positions, and they experience disparities in promotion [ 37 ]. A study of 50 000 medical school faculty who were assistant or associate professors between 1980 and 1989 indicated that, by 1997, nearly 50% of white junior faculty had been promoted while only 30%–36% of underrepresented junior faculty were promoted, even when adjusted for gender, tenure status, and NIH funding [ 38 ]. This was confirmed in 128 academic medical centers in which black and Hispanic faculty were promoted less frequently than white faculty across nearly 75% of institutions. The consequences of this are clear in that the effects include the reduced ability to recruit promising underrepresented applicants in fields in which young trainees cannot find senior role models with whom they can identify [ 39 ]. “Cultural taxation” or the “minority tax” is a byproduct of this, as individuals who are underrepresented are frequently asked to serve on committees, to fill the need for representation [ 40 ]. This is even more pronounced with intersectionality, in which an individual may represent multiple interests. This can create a career burden, particularly on senior women faculty, owing to the shortage of representation on committees. This type of service is often not recognized through compensation or traditional promotion metrics.

The Approach to Fostering Diversity Permeates All Levels, Including Individuals, Institutions, National Organizations, and Government Policy

The Infectious Diseases Society of American (IDSA) has set strategic priorities to establish state-of-the-art clinical guidelines, advocate for funding for critical prevention and public health activities, lead the way in antimicrobial stewardship and combating resistance, promote the value of infectious diseases physician-scientists who focus on human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), bring the best and brightest into our field, and put infectious diseases and HIV research front, center, and into practice. The IDSA Board of Directors has launched the Inclusion, Diversity, Access and Equity Task Force (IDA&E) and recognizes that this mission relates to every level of society. “We are confident these talented professionals will successfully fulfill the task force charge to examine the workings of the Society. We are thankful they have volunteered their talent and time to ensure that diversity, inclusion and equity are reflected throughout the organization including the leadership and the strategies of IDSA,” said IDSA President Paul Auwaerter, MD, MBA, in 2018. This governance task force has been charged specifically to support diversity, inclusion, and equity through improved transparency, communication, and efficiency, and to maximize opportunities for members to engage in volunteer leadership.

HOW CAN OUR FIELD FOSTER A CULTURE OF DIVERSITY?

A key first step involves recruitment of individuals who are classically underrepresented in science. It is important to draw from a broad pool of qualified individuals. This may involve outreach, improving pipelines and marketing initiatives, and expanding the definition of excellence [ 41 ]. Importantly, recruitment efforts are coupled to retention, and therefore a strong system of support and mentoring is critical for cultivating the careers of young scientists, particularly those from underrepresented groups. It is essential to ensure that the level of diversity among admissions leadership and personnel represents the level of diversity among candidates the institution is hoping to attract and is capable of supporting. Pipeline programs to enhance mentorship and diversity have been extremely successful in advancing the career of individuals who might not otherwise have been supported through this training [ 42 ].

Combating Unconscious Bias Requires a Multifaceted Effort

Unconscious bias can be mitigated with data-driven strategies [ 36 ]. A combination of in-person workshop training with regular reminders through committee emphasis and institution-sponsored awareness campaigns have been shown to have sustainable improvement in recruitment of diverse candidates. Ways to systematically mitigate the impact of unconscious bias in recruitment and selection include developing clear criteria and standards for the position prior to recruitment efforts, developing a clear evaluation system in advance, conducting anonymous voting, and ensuring that search committees are diverse. Witteman et al reported on a study of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, which has phased out conventional grant review in which the science and investigator are both evaluated. A new program focused on the research and allowed for the analysis of almost 24 000 grant applications between 2011 and 2016. The authors found that, with a program evaluating research background and qualifications, the gender gap was 4% in favor of male applicants; however, with the new evaluation approach emphasizing the researcher’s science, the gap was closed, resulting in only a 0.9% advantage for male applicants. This study was not randomized, and it is important to note that, in the new review process, reviewers were asked to complete unconscious bias training. which may have had an additional impact on closing the gender gap [ 40 , 41 ]. Still, reviewer training can have a tremendous impact on reducing biased practices. Conference conveners can make efforts to achieve greater equity and diversity in speaker selection by making programs aware of their diversity statistics, by increasing the diversity of the convener teams, and through direct instruction to encourage diversity [ 43 ]. Individuals should promote field experts from underrepresented groups whenever asked for nominations for panels, awards, and speaking opportunities. Creating a database of experts in the field for easy access has been successful in several fields. Social media has also been effective in promoting and disseminating information about oneself and one’s colleagues [ 44 , 45 ].

Leaders in Medical Education Can Aspire to Parse Genetic and Social Determinant of Health

While race has classically been linked with disease as a risk factor, it has become understood that race is more accurately a marker of vulnerability and systemic disadvantage. Our educational systems can better parse genetic predisposition, associated with ancestry, from social determinants of health. There are important differences among individuals of genomic diversity, but this can easily be conflated with social inequalities attributed to determinants such as education, incarceration, and unemployment. Medical students often feel ill equipped to consider race in clinical medicine [ 7 ]. Medical schools are developing curricula that address historical roots of racism and bias and the role that social and genetic determinants of health play in patient care. Sexual and gender minority patient population groups have not historically been emphasized in the undergraduate medical curriculum, and this is important as the LGBTQ population is at increased risk for mental illness, HIV infection, unemployment, poverty, and harassment [ 46 ]. Medical schools have begun implementing curricula that include contexts emphasizing the unique health considerations of LGBTQ and other populations [ 47 ]. Within the medical center, central initiatives can be taken to mitigate racism and bias through change in management strategies [ 47–49 ].

WHAT SHOULD INSTITUTIONS DO TO FOSTER DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION?

Identify and define threats to the promotion of diversity and inclusion.

The first step is to engage in an ongoing systemic review of policies regarding recruitment and retention, including equity in salaries and resources. Being transparent by collecting and publicizing diversity metrics can engage faculty in dialogues and promote a culture of openness and inclusivity. Institutions should conduct regular anonymous climate surveys, disseminate their results, and respond to needed circumstances [ 50 ]. These can be effective for gauging the sentiment of individuals and can provide actionable directions for change on a continuous basis.

Develop and Adhere to Policies That Reflect a Lens of Diversity and Inclusion

Recruitment efforts should include outreach efforts and inclusion initiatives to seek out excellence in numerous settings, including pipeline programs and mentoring networks [ 50 , 51 ]. Standardized testing should be deemphasized for the sake of holistic review [ 10 ] and because of data that standardized testing does not predict success in physician-scientist careers. Safe spaces should be created that encourage equity and recognition of individual needs. These can include networking and support groups for specialized groups that provide education and social events [ 9 ]. Policies focused on diversity and inclusion can be extended to educational settings by using nondiscriminatory language in classrooms, curriculum-development programs, and job announcements and by encouraging trainees, faculty, and staff to participate in diversity training [ 52 ]. On a departmental level, the process of simplifying name changes and records can hold meaning for transgender people [ 53 ]. Mentorship is critical and should be made available to individuals throughout their training trajectory in various forms. Institutions can reward mentoring through incentives such as salary, educational, and research support [ 39 ] and by promoting mentors for winning mentorship awards from and participating in professional networks [ 54 ]. Faculty development programs and onboarding protocols are critical for instilling values around inclusion and unconscious bias. These practices should be included in professional development on an ongoing basis. The human resources department should have a specific diversity strategy that ensures that anyone in a leadership role receives proper diversity training. Educating the existing and future leaders is critical to this mission.

Educate and Provide Resources to Uphold Institutional Policies

Individuals working at academic institutions experience life events during their training and work that can take a toll on their wellness and can compromise their ability to succeed. By recognizing the influence of these events on an individual’s wellness and ability to function successfully, institutions can implement initiatives to help support its workforce. These initiatives have been demonstrated to improve profitability and productivity in the business world.

Family Support

For families, institutional resources can include a child development center that provides childcare, childhood education, after school and holiday programs, emergency backup daycare, nursing rooms, changing tables, parent rooms, lactation rooms, professional travel support (ie, support for travel for children and/or childcare providers) while at professional conferences, a stop-the-clock policy (to allow tenure-track faculty to request an extension of their tenure evaluation to accommodate responsibilities related to birth, adoption, illness, and elder care), recruitment packages for dual-career couples, subsidized legal fees for family services (ie, family planning), and elder care [ 55 ].

Mental Health and Wellness

To help ensure mental health and wellness, institutions can provide access to mental health services, culture activities, and a recreation office for low-priced access to concerts, performances, art exhibitions, lectures, and clubs; a robust and centralized wellness program; subsidized health benefits; and physical fitness incentives.

Enforcement of Recruitment and Retention Policy

Institutional leadership can be held accountable for salary equity and diversity at all levels if policies related to recruitment and retention of faculty that emphasize equity in all domains of diversity are enforced.

Language Support

Institutions can offer language classes to those for whom the language of the institution is not the first language, for presentation and writing skill training, for editing support, and for grant writing support.

Credit for Institutional Service

Institutions can provide credit to individuals for institutional service that will contribute to their salary and/or promotion package, so as not to disadvantage those from underrepresented groups who are asked to make contributions in the interest of fostering diversity [ 37 , 56 ].

To address the housing needs of trainees and faculty, institutions can provide resources that help these individuals access affordable residential facilities near campus.

Promote Diversity Publicly

Institutions should implement clear statements to showcase their diversity and nondiscrimination. An inclusion statement should assert that the institution prohibits unlawful discrimination on the basis of race, color, national or ethnic origin, sex, age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, marital status, or any other characteristic protected by law. A statement preventing unlawful harassment, including sexual harassment and sexual violence, is also critical [ 57 ]. Offices of diversity and inclusion should ensure compliance with the Civil Rights Act, particularly titles VI, VII, and IX; the Equal Pay Act; the Americans with Disabilities Act; Sections 503 and 504 of the Rehabilitation Act; the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and Executive Order 11246; and the California Fair Employment and Housing Act. Outreach and recruitment efforts should ensure that talent searches are broad, wide, and fair. Institutions can demonstrate their commitment to diversity through inclusion in their mission statement and core values. It can also be done by ensuring that inclusion in conveyed in branding materials by being conscious of the faces used in public displays and recipients of honors and awards. In sum, visibility and intersectional innovation should be celebrated, and institutional change arises from embracing an explicit intention to engage stakeholders in moving toward meaningful new directions [ 6 ].

Create a System of Mutual Accountability

There is a need for periodic reassessment of policies to ensure that inclusion efforts are being upheld through recruitment, curriculum, development, and academic affairs [ 58 ]. Annual appraisals and evaluations for trainees and faculty are critical to identifying gaps and should systematically include inclusivity statements to ensure that needs are being met [ 35 , 56 ]. An institutional report card for diversity missions can be created and presented to the dean on an annual or more frequent basis [ 59 ]. A mistreatment or grievance committee [ 60 ], as well as ombuds office, are critical to providing a confidential forum for reporting and accountability. Finally, a policy of zero tolerance for mistreatment and harassment should be developed, with clear consequences outlined in the student and faculty handbook. Departments can be incentivized to reward diversity and inclusion.

CONCLUSIONS

Unconscious bias is a powerful force because it can be unapparent to individuals in leadership positions. Combating unconscious bias on a daily basis is a great challenge of high importance throughout organizations and institutions as they work to overcome the marked challenges that account for underrepresentation in biomedical science and in the field of infectious diseases. Fortunately, there are studies that indicate a positive impact of unconscious bias training, but of greatest importance is the recognition that diversity is everyone’s issue. It is not something that can be left to those who are affected by underrepresentation—it must be imparted to all in leadership, even if they do not understand the affliction of underrepresentation themselves. Individuals have the power to make a difference. Figure 1 outlines steps that any one individual can take to foster diversity and inclusion. Teams are critical to shed light on alternative perspectives and to consider approaches from numerous different angles, to ensure that no one is left out.

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Suggested activities to foster diversity and inclusion.

The IDSA is committed to tackling these problems. The IDSA’s first effort involved establishing the Gender Disparity Task Force in 2016 to identify contributors to gender disparities and to make recommendations to address these disparities [ 32 ]. The hopeful outcome will be to increase physicians’ compensation to create equity. There is great optimism for the IDA&E that will hopefully result in a strong future for infectious diseases physicians and researchers. It will be the work of individuals, leadership, institutions, societies, and government agencies to work together to foster a culture of diversity.

Supplement sponsorship. This supplement is sponsored by the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

Disclaimer . It is not the intent of this article to be linked directly to the Infectious Disease Society of America’s Inclusion, Diversity, Access, and Equity Task Force, nor is it the authors’ intentions to discuss the scope of work assigned to this task force. This article is an independent review addressing the gaps in our understanding of the science and value of diversity.

Financial support . This work was supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (grant K08AI120806 to T. H. S.).

Potential conflicts of interest . All authors: No reported conflicts. All authors have submitted the ICMJE Form for Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest. Conflicts that the editors consider relevant to the content of the manuscript have been disclosed.

More From Forbes

The power of diversity and inclusion: driving innovation and success.

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Jason Miller helps influential brands and celebrities create generational wealth with their businesses | CEO, Strategic Advisor Board .

Diversity and inclusion is a strategic advantage that promotes innovation in organizations, better decision making and stronger workplace cultures. See the strategies for building a diverse and inclusive organization to achieve long-term business success.

The value of diversity and inclusion has become increasingly recognized in society and in business. Organizations that promote diversity and cultivate inclusive environments are reaping huge rewards in terms of innovation, better decision making and better performance overall. The positive impact of diversity and inclusion extends beyond social responsibility; it is a strategic imperative that drives success and positions companies for long-term sustainability.

The Business Case For Diversity And Inclusion

Diversity can stimulate innovation by challenging conventional thinking, encouraging fresh ideas and promoting creative problem-solving. In research studies, diverse groups with people who have different backgrounds, genders, experiences and perspectives consistently generate more innovative solutions than homogeneous groups. Embracing diversity unlocks the potential for innovative products, services and approaches.

Enhanced Decision Making And Problem-Solving

Organizations can make better decisions by leveraging their workforce's diverse expertise and knowledge. Individuals are empowered to share their opinions and unique insights in inclusive environments. Organizations can benefit from well-rounded discussions and comprehensive evaluations by valuing and incorporating diverse perspectives. As a result of considering a wider range of possibilities and challenging groupthink, diverse teams are more effective at solving complex problems.

Best High-Yield Savings Accounts Of 2024

Best 5% interest savings accounts of 2024, benefits of diversity and inclusion for organizations.

The financial performance of companies prioritizing diversity and inclusion consistently outperforms their peers. Financial returns are strongly correlated with diverse executive boards. Although, it’s important to note that diversity and inclusion should come from a place of increasing better work environments and employee satisfaction, and not firstly from a financially charged approach.

Increasing market share and customer loyalty is easier for companies that focus on diversity since they are better equipped to understand and connect with a broader customer base. Diversity can also foster a competitive advantage for companies attracting and retaining rockstar employees.

Enhanced Employee Engagement And Productivity

An inclusive culture cultivates a sense of belonging, respect and psychological safety, which increases employee engagement and productivity . This is because employees are more likely to feel valued for their unique contributions when they are celebrated and recognized. This type of environment encourages collaboration and innovation, as individuals from a variety of backgrounds bring with them different skills, perspectives and life experiences.

Strengthened Employer Brand And Reputation

Companies prioritizing diversity and inclusion are considered employers of choice by top talent. In today's socially conscious world, committed and dedicated employees are more likely to feel valued for their unique contributions if they are committed and dedicated to achieving organizational culture and promoting diversity in their workforce. This positive perception attracts diverse talent and strengthens relationships with customers, partners and the community.

Benefits Of Diversity And Inclusion For Employees

Creating a diversified workforce provides equal opportunities for all employees to grow and advance in their careers. Employees can then be inspired to push harder if they are celebrated for achieving organizational goals and given the ability to continue developing as staff members and individuals.

To strive towards an inclusive workspace, promote employees' sense of belonging, acceptance and well-being. In addition, you can promote improved mental health by creating supportive environments that encourage open communication, empathy and work-life balance. If employees associate good feelings with their workplaces, they can perform better.

Expanded Cultural Competence And Global Perspective

Diversity and inclusion can expose employees to various cultures, traditions and perspectives. This exposure can foster cultural competence. In my opinion, employees must be motivated, committed and dedicated to achieving organizational goals to feel valued for their unique contributions. Employees can learn and benefit from one another, better navigate diverse markets and build relationships based on cultural understanding and empathy. This cultural competence goes far beyond the workplace and creates stronger communities and a better world.

Strategies For Embracing Diversity And Fostering Inclusion

Creating a diverse and inclusive organization begins with leadership commitment and accountability. Senior leaders must champion diversity and inclusion as strategic priorities and set the tone for the organization. By leading by example, they can inspire others and strive to ensure diversity and inclusion initiatives are integrated into business strategies and practices.

Inclusive Recruitment And Hiring Practices

Organizations can promote diversity by adopting inclusive recruitment and hiring practices. This includes widening the candidate pool, leveraging diverse sourcing channels and hiring individuals from underrepresented communities. Establishing clear diversity goals and promoting diverse representation in all levels of the organization, including leadership positions, is essential and demonstrates the organization's commitment to inclusive practices.

Building Inclusive Work Cultures

Organizational culture can take some time to cultivate, but the effort is worth it. Organizations can achieve this by encouraging collaboration on projects across departments, honest communication and teamwork, and providing opportunities and resources. Training programs and workshops on unconscious bias, cultural competence and inclusive leadership can also help cultivate understanding and awareness.

Continuous Evaluation And Improvement

Building a diverse and inclusive organization is an ongoing journey. It is essential to continuously evaluate diversity and inclusion efforts through metrics, surveys and feedback mechanisms. By gathering data and insights, organizations can identify areas for improvement and develop targeted strategies. Your employees are one of your greatest resources as a business owner. Ask for feedback regularly and work to incorporate new ideas and suggestions generated by employees from all levels of the organization.

Inclusivity is not only the right thing to do, but it is a strategic advantage for organizations aiming to thrive in today's evolving workplace. By building diverse workforces, organizations can propel innovation, improve company decision-making and create an engaging and supportive work environment. Through leadership commitment, inclusive recruitment practices and cultural development, organizations can unlock the full potential of their teams and position themselves for long-term success. Let us embrace diversity and foster inclusion, not just for the benefit of our organizations but society at large.

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Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter

Heidi Grant

Research shows they’re more successful in three important ways.

Striving to increase workplace diversity is not an empty slogan — it is a good business decision. A 2015 McKinsey report on 366 public companies found that those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean, and those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have returns above the industry mean.

DR David Rock is a cofounder of the NeuroLeadership Institute and author of Your Brain at Work .
Heidi Grant is a social psychologist who researches, writes, and speaks about the science of motivation. Her books include Reinforcements: How to Get People to Help You , Nine Things Successful People Do Differently , and No One Understands You and What to Do About It . She is EY US Director of Learning R&D.

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How Diverse Teams Increase Innovation and Growth

Diversity, equity & inclusion.

Creating diverse teams throughout the organization isn’t just the right thing to do—it’s a source of competitive advantage

In recent years DE&I—that is, diversity, equity, and inclusion —has become a priority for many progressive organizations. Not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s a source of competitive advantage. In order to solve intractable challenges that companies face today, they need to unleash the power and potential of all their people.

Case studies from companies around the world show that business leaders who combine the right mix of skills, identities, and lived experiences through the creation of “diverse-by-design” teams are reaping the benefits. By tapping into employees’ unique skills and perspectives—and maximizing the group’s collective intelligence—leaders are seeing more innovation, fresh marketable ideas and creative solutions to business problems.

According to the latest statistics from Korn Ferry, 80% of the World’s Most Admired Companies purposely create inclusive and diverse teams to improve team performance and creativity. Our research shows that diverse-by-design teams make better decisions than homogenous ones 87% of the time, and are 70% more likely to capture new markets. Inclusive innovators are also more likely to see their ideas become marketable products.

Diversity at Work

Activating diversity at barilla.

Barilla, a world-leading manufacturer of pasta, bread and biscuits based in Parma, Italy, is a prime example of a company turning to diverse-by-design teams to drive innovation.

Throughout its 146-year history, the organization has continuously invested in research and new technologies to improve its processes and develop sustainable products. But by accelerating its DE&I strategy over the past decade and learning to “activate diversity” through inclusive leadership, the company has found its sweet spot, says Floriana Notarangelo, Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer for the Barilla Group.

“If you’re able to activate diversity, you will have more innovative ideas, processes, and technology available to you and not your competitors,” says Notarangelo.

Notarangelo cites the example of launching Barilla’s successful product line, Legumotti, a rice-shaped pasta made entirely from legume flour. In developing the concept business leaders consulted employees of different roles, backgrounds, and experiences—along with one of Barilla’s key retailers—about how to increase legume consumption among a new generation of time-strapped cooks. “It’s that willingness to include people who aren’t 100% focused on research and development,” says Notarangelo. “Of course, the process is led by R&D, but you make the assumption that good ideas can come from anywhere.”

Making Hybrid Work Inclusive

MSCI, a leading provider of decision-support tools and services for the global investment community, is another company using diversity at work to spur innovation and solve business challenges. Exiting the pandemic, MSCI needed to develop a hybrid working model that would be inclusive of all its 6,000+ employees globally, while also serving its customers. “It was important that everyone had a voice in our solution because it needed to penetrate the entire company to be successful,” says Tia Counts, MSCI’s Chief Responsibility and Chief Diversity Officer.

Working with Korn Ferry, MSCI designed a pilot program to ensure its future work solution was as employee-driven as possible. Rather than approaching senior staff to develop a plan, MSCI created diverse-by-design teams from across a number of employee demographics, roles and levels. They specifically focused on the overall team dynamic instead of individual strengths, to see if the collective efforts of diverse teams would prove more fruitful.

The results were positive on two fronts, says Counts. First, input from these diverse teams successfully provided innovative elements that formed part of the new hybrid work model. And second, the engagement level of these teams was notably superior to programs where diverse and inclusive groupings weren’t as intentional.

“Leaders must greatly expand who they let in on the innovation process. They should consider diverse groups of stakeholders, including employees, customers, community, and board members, too.”

An Urgent Need for Diverse Teams

In a global economic climate, diverse teams are expected to become more prominent in the workplace—to put it simply, there are more companies out there attracting varied employees from around the world. But as technologies like artificial intelligence continue to gain momentum, the case for creating diverse-by-design teams right now is even more compelling, says Mike Solomons , Inclusive Innovation Solutions Leader and Senior Client Partner at Korn Ferry. “We’ve seen statistics that say 70% of the routine tasks that homogenous teams tend to be better at are going to be automated,” he says. In turn, diverse teams will become a huge advantage as they’re able to work on complex challenges.

For companies looking to shift current DE&I programs towards innovation, Solomons points to some key elements that can guide companies along the way .

Executives need to promote inclusive leadership and be “open and explicit” about business challenges that can’t be solved with traditional thinking, says Solomons. “For MSCI, they recognized that the organization needs to work for everyone,” he says. “It couldn’t have been a top-down, one-size-fits all mandate.”
Leaders must greatly expand who they let in on the innovation process. They should consider diverse groups of stakeholders, including employees, customers, community, and board members, too. It can take thousands of ideas to come up with one breakthrough, says Solomons, so engaging different perspectives can get businesses there faster. “Once we break down those boundaries, we now have the option of co-creating with those who are experiencing the challenges themselves—and who are equally invested in the solutions,” he says.

Beyond just developing diverse-by-design teams, inclusive leaders must remove barriers and cultivate environments where every participant has a voice and differences are valued. “We may have a team with great potential now, but they’re fragile and new, and we want to make sure we can activate them,” says Solomons. “That’s where the leadership really comes in.”

Unleash the power of all

How to Cultivate Diversity at Work

Diverse teams can help solve business challenges, supercharge innovation, and enable business growth—so it’s a no-brainer for companies to implement diverse-by-design teams into their DE&I strategies. Find out more on how to get the structure, processes, and ongoing support to make it happen in your workplace.

Want more inspiration first? Listen to our webinar series from some of the leading global experts in DE&I.

Key takeaways

Why diverse teams spur innovation
How global companies are using diverse teams to solve business challenges
How to target DE&I strategy to unlock the potential of diverse teams

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COMMENTS

Welcoming diversity in the learning environment: teachers ...
The handbook is comprised of nine modules - each of which presents the conceptual discussion of key topics related to inclusion and diversity and features some promising case studies, instruments and approaches. It also provides a framework for ensuring learning continuity in the wake of crises and emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and ...
The Benefits of Inclusion and Diversity in the Classroom
It has also enabled social scientists to study how diversity in the classroom leads to students' increased cultural understanding, stronger critical thinking skills and enhanced creativity, which all better prepare them for adulthood. The National Education Association reports that 2014 was the first year in which the majority of students in ...
Integrating equity, diversity, and inclusion into social innovation
As social innovation education expands within HEIs, educators need to seriously consider where equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) is integrated into the curriculum. Addressing wicked problems requires co-creation to produce social innovations that empower marginalized communities and challenge the status quo.
How Diversity Makes Us Smarter
Diversity enhances creativity. It encourages the search for novel information and perspectives, leading to better decision making and problem solving. Diversity can improve the bottom line of companies and lead to unfettered discoveries and breakthrough innovations. Even simply being exposed to diversity can change the way you think.
How Diversity Makes Us Smarter
Being around people who are different from us makes us more creative, more diligent and harder-working. The first thing to acknowledge about diversity is that it can be difficult. In the U.S ...
Predictors of Interdisciplinary Team Innovation in Higher Education
Cognitive diversity. Overwhelmingly, research findings support that a team with diverse functional backgrounds fosters more significant problem-solving through diverse knowledge or skills (Williams & O'Reilly, 1998). Diverse teams have individuals with different information networks that promote greater diversity of knowledge.
Diversity: Promoting new perspectives
In science, technology, engineering, and math—the STEM fields—more women and minorities are earning Ph.D.s than ever. At the same time, business and university leaders are seeking to increase personnel diversity because heterogeneity in gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background, and race/ethnicity are known to promote innovation.
Unlocking the Power of Cognitive Diversity
Embracing cognitive diversity in the workplace can indeed be a "game-changer." By valuing and encouraging different perspectives, organizations can unlock the benefits of increased innovation ...
Achieving the Power of Cognitive Diversity
A World of Diversity Is at Your Disposal. Cognitive diversity is a powerful force for innovation, problem-solving, and personal and professional growth. We can achieve greater creativity, better ...
Why Diversity and Inclusion Are Important for Problem-Solving
To activate diversity, you need to create an environment that embraces the different ways individuals think, feel, and act. This is achieved by taking small actions over time to make inclusive behaviors a habit. Below we'll discuss three ways to help your team encourage diversity and inclusion when problem-solving. 1. Make All Voices Count.
Diversity and Problem-Solving
A consulting and solutions company, Arc Aspicio solves problems by applying our integrated capabilities in strategy, design, data, human capital, behavioral science, and technology. The company passionately pursues our vision to be the hub of creativity where people take action to change the world. To do this, employees collaborate with clients ...
Cultural diversity drives innovation: empowering teams for success
To prepare such innovation teams for success, it is valuable to understand the dynamics of team diversity at the project level and the underlying barriers and opportunities presented.,This paper reviews the literature and case studies on cultural inputs to ideation and innovation, assessing team diversity through readily available instruments ...
How Diversity Can Drive Innovation
She is coauthor of the CTI book Ambition in Black + White: The Feminist Narrative Revised and CTI reports including "Innovation, Diversity and Market Growth" as well as "Sponsor Effect 2.0." .
Learning to think together: Creativity, interdisciplinary collaboration
It will also encourage an acceptance that ideas that are generated, but not accepted, still contribute to the problem-solving process as they illuminate aspects of the complex problem (Tahirsylaj, 2012). By encouraging risk and embracing mistakes as information, epistemic humility keeps the collaboration focused on the complex problem and not ...
Stanford study provides evidence of the 'diversity-innovation paradox
In the business world, it has long been believed that diversity brings perspectives that accelerate problem solving and boost profits. But those who diversify these organizations still struggle to climb the corporate ladder. One explanation for this so-called "diversity-innovation paradox" is that the innovations they introduce are devalued when it comes to decisions about
The Science and Value of Diversity: Closing the Gaps in Our
Diversity enhances innovation in biomedical sciences and, as it relates to novel findings and treatment of diverse populations, in the field of infectious diseases. There are many obstacles to achieving diversity in the biomedical workforce, which create challenges at the levels of recruitment, retention, education, and promotion of individuals.
Why Is Diversity Vital For Innovation?
By comparison, the impact of identity diversity is mixed. One part of this is due to the fact that routine tasks are better done by individuals. A second part of it is due to the fact that ...
Teams Solve Problems Faster When They're More Cognitively Diverse
Looking at the executive teams we work with as consultants and those we teach in the classroom, increased diversity of gender, ethnicity, and age is apparent.
Does Diversity Actually Increase Creativity?
In that sense, creativity may lead to diversity more than vice-versa. Setting aside social, political, and moral reasons for encouraging a more diverse workplace, there is arguably no better ...
The Power Of Diversity And Inclusion: Driving Innovation And ...
getty. Diversity and inclusion is a strategic advantage that promotes innovation in organizations, better decision making and stronger workplace cultures. See the strategies for building a diverse ...
Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter
Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter. Striving to increase workplace diversity is not an empty slogan — it is a good business decision. A 2015 McKinsey report on 366 public companies found that those ...
How Diverse Teams Increase Innovation and Growth
Diverse teams can help solve business challenges, supercharge innovation, and enable business growth—so it's a no-brainer for companies to implement diverse-by-design teams into their DE&I strategies. Find out more on how to get the structure, processes, and ongoing support to make it happen in your workplace.

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What we believe makes a difference

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Katherine W. Phillips

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Antecedents of Team Learning Distilled from Both Qualitative and Quantitative Research

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Neurodiversity

Overcoming Barriers to Cognitive Diversity

A World of Diversity Is at Your Disposal

Why Diversity and Inclusion Are Important for Problem-Solving

The Power of Activating Diversity of Thought

1. Make All Voices Count

2. Welcome All Ideas

3. Normalize Disagreements

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Cultural diversity drives innovation: empowering teams for success

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Introduction

Cross-cultural competence in innovation teams

The cultural intelligence four-factor model

The big five model of personality

Assessing the composition of teams

The science of developing diverse innovation teams: the science of team science

Equipping innovation teams for success

Conclusions and implications

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Acknowledgements

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