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Key points
- Cognitive diversity (CD) is different from demographic diversity in important ways (e.g., race, gender, age).
- CD refers to differences in the ways that team members think about important tasks.
- A naturalistic study identified five important dimensions of CD.
- Researchers found that CD can improve performance on some tasks but interfere with others.
This essay was co-authored by Gary Klein, Emily Newsome, Kari Hoy, Wendy Jephson, and Malcolm MacColl.
How much do we want team members to offer divergent perspectives? Organizations that can harness cognitive diversity (CD) may become more productive and competitive.
CD is different from demographic diversity (e.g., gender, race, and age). We define CD as differences in how team members think about important tasks and activities.
That all sounds good, but there isn’t much consensus from the literature. Researchers have studied cognitive diversity by measuring differences in a wide variety of psychological factors, including personality, values, preferences, thinking styles, education, experience, and problem-solving strategies.
Even worse, Sulik et al. (2021) have argued that there’s not much evidence that CD makes a difference.
My colleagues and I got involved in the issues surrounding CD when a client in one of the major financial investment firms asked us to explore the topic to see if there was a way to improve performance.
So we had an opportunity for a fresh look, using a naturalistic perspective. We reviewed 22 articles and noted that most of these studies relied on small groups of college students performing tasks that didn’t have any direct relevance to their lives.
In contrast, we performed eight cognitive interviews with the client’s team to learn how CD played out in their decision-making.
Relevant Tasks
We identified four primary tasks that would be affected by CD within this client’s financial services work:
- Identifying investment opportunities
- Building mental pictures of the companies they are considering
- Embracing the clash of views and ideas
- Managing meetings and coordinating with each other (an enabling task for the first three).
We predicted that CD might play out differently for these tasks.
Major Dimensions of Cognitive Diversity
Then we identified five dimensions of CD. Previous researchers have already mentioned some of these dimensions, but others, to our knowledge, were unique to our study.
Dimension 1: Reactions to novel ideas
Some people are excited and enthusiastic when they hear about a new approach, whereas others are inherently skeptical, thinking about the weaknesses of that approach. Of course, few people are always extreme on one end of this dimension or the other. Nevertheless, we suggest that people generally fall into one of these camps.
And that helps a team. You don’t want everyone jumping on the bandwagon with no critical thinking, and you don’t want everyone shooting down every unfamiliar concept. You want both types.
Dimension 2: General mindset or stance
People have general tendencies about how they approach new ideas. For the team we studied, we distinguished three general mindsets: contrarian, trend analyst, and disruptor. These three contrasting approaches worked for the organization in the past. The downside is that different mindsets can interfere with common ground and team cohesion unless the team is united by shared goals and mutual respect.
Dimension 3: Knowledge and experience
Perhaps the most obvious difference between team members is the various types of knowledge and experience people have acquired. Longevity, variety of experiences, and previous decisions can all influence how people think today. The research literature has also emphasized the importance of having a variety of knowledge and experience.
While there is little disagreement about the value of diverse knowledge and experience, there are some caveats. Experts often respond negatively to new ideas, claiming that they’ve seen them tried in the past, and they haven’t worked.
Perhaps the strategy should be to draw on expertise to understand an opportunity's potential and limitations but not to rely too heavily on experts in making decisions based on what has been tried in the past.
Dimension 4: Preference for working collaboratively vs. independently
This dimension also seems related to the way people prefer to meet—open-ended discussions or with a clear agenda.
CD may have some downside here. People who relish collaboration may enjoy opportunities for group debate much more than people who like to pursue independent analysis and are impatient for the debates to end so they can return to work. It is usually hard to find a good balance.
Dimension 5: Tolerance for uncertainty
Everyone believes they have a high tolerance for uncertainty, but in practice, some people are prepared to take action without the thorough due diligence that others expect.
Tolerance for uncertainty includes a need for closure, a need for structure, and reactions to loose ends. Some people strive to reach closure, whereas others embrace the value of messiness. This dimension links to the idea of adaptors vs. innovators from the literature. Adaptors prefer more structure when solving problems, whereas innovators are comfortable making discoveries in less structured environments.
This dimension poses the potential for interfering with performance. Differences in styles can create frustration rather than synergy.
We speculated that the five dimensions would have different effects on the financial management tasks of the team. We prepared strategies and criteria for assessing critical tasks and dimensions. And we developed a self-test for CD that clients could use.
Counter to beliefs about cognitive diversity
Our small project raised questions about some of the standard beliefs:
We found that CD is not always a good thing. Its benefits depend on the task. And sometimes CD can get in the way.
We also raised questions about the value of CD research in artificial tasks with non-engaged participants.
Implications
Our study left us excited about the potential for cognitive diversity to contribute to team effectiveness. Teams can use CD to assess themselves, to see if they have CD where it matters, and if they have it, see where it can interfere with their work. Teams can apply strategies to try to do a better job of taking advantage of CD and to reduce the downsides. Teams might also consider CD during recruitment. Further, team members may want to expand their stance on one or more dimensions.
References
Sulik, J., Bahrami, B., & Deroy, O. (2021). The Diversity Gap: when diversity matters for knowledge. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17456916211006070.
