Learning from Team and Group Diversity: Nurturing and Benefiting from our Heterogeneity

Abstract

By 2019, diversity is an established fact in most workplaces, teams, and work-groups, presenting both old and new challenges to CSCW in terms of team structure and technological supports for increasingly diverse teams. The research literature on diversity and teams has examined many definitions and attributes of diversity, and has described different types of teams, tasks, and measures, with contrasting and even contradictory results. Diversity becomes a strength in some studies, and a burden in others. The literature is similarly complex regarding individual and organizational approaches to realize those strengths, or to mitigate those burdens. In this workshop, we collectively take stock of these complex findings; we consider the several theoretical and methodological efforts to organize these findings; and we propose new research directions to address the “diversity of diversity studies.”