The corporate trend to boost creativity that is actually counter-productive
While great minds think alike, the belief that teams with diverse perspectives boost creativity is increasingly deployed by progressive business bosses.
But research suggests that while groups with differing expertise do produce more left-field ideas, they also come up with fewer practical solutions.
The University of Waterloo, Canada, and Texas Tech University invited diverse or uniform teams to come up with suggestions for an unused university space.
They found that while teams with differing skill sets and perspectives brought unique viewpoints to the table, they often struggled to create practical and workable solutions.
Adam Presslee, a professor from the School of Accounting and Finance at Waterloo, said: “Our study challenges the trendy belief that teams with diverse expertise always boost creativity.
“While teams with differing skill sets and perspectives tend to come up with more original ideas, they also face friction when trying to turn those ideas into practical, implementable solutions.”
Companies cut back programmes
Many companies, including Meta, Amazon and McDonalds have scaled back their diversity programmes during a growing backlash against affirmative and inclusive policies which are believed to have contributed to stocks tumbling, and heads rolling, at some firms.
At the end of last year, Jaguar faced global ridicule for releasing a rebranding advert featuring a group of diverse models who seemingly had little in common with its core customer base.
This week, Donald Trump, the US president, cancelled all diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes in federal agencies and instructed all federal DEI staff to be put on paid leave ahead of being laid off.
Findings raise ‘important questions’
Waterloo University said that their results challenge the “widespread belief” that teams with diverse expertise are automatically more creative, adding that the findings raise “important questions” for managers and businesses worldwide.
For the experiment, accountants and engineers were placed into 40 two-person teams and each fitted with a brain scanning cap to see how synchronised their brain activities were.
Participants were told they had $240,000 (£194,000) to refit an empty space of about 8,500 square feet in a university management school.
Diverse groups came up with unique but impractical suggestions such as building an escape room, while more similar teams suggested a simulation centre where business students could practice real-world scenarios.
They found that when team members’ brains were more synchronised in certain areas, it influenced their ideas’ uniqueness or usefulness.
Diverse expertise was found to enhance the uniqueness of team ideas, but reduce their usefulness.
Teams with differing skill sets and perspectives also trigger different areas of the brain associated with divergent and convergent thinking.
Prof Presslee said: “For companies to get the most out of their teams, they need to think carefully about what kind of creative output they want.
“Diverse expertise is great if the goal is innovative, ‘out of the box’ ideas. But if you need timely usable ideas, you may want a more focused, uniform team.”
Diversity policies may increase workplace tension
In 2015, McKinsey, the management consultancy, found that companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity were 35 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.
However, by 2022, the Harvard Business Review published an article questioning DEI policies, arguing that the effectiveness of diversity policies was “lower than many practitioners make it out to be”.
Critics argue that DEI policies actually increase workplace tension and risk a backlash that worsens inequalities for vulnerable groups.
Other more recent studies have suggested that while diverse teams are more innovative and less subject to group-think, they are also at greater risk of interpersonal conflicts.
The research was published in the journal Management Science.