Prior work has provided strong evidence that, within organizational settings, teams that bring a diversity of information and perspectives to a task are more effective than teams that do not. If this form of informational diversity confers performance advantages, why do we often see largely homogeneous teams in practice? One canonical argument is that the benefits of informational diversity are in tension with affinity bias. To better understand the impact of this tension on the makeup of teams, we analyze a sequential model of team formation in which individuals care about their team's performance (captured in terms of accurately predicting some future outcome based on a set of features) but experience a cost as a result of interacting with teammates who use different approaches to the prediction task. Our analysis of this simple model reveals a set of subtle behaviors that team-growth dynamics can exhibit: (i) from certain initial team compositions, they can make progress toward better performance but then get stuck partway to optimally diverse teams; while (ii) from other initial compositions, they can also move away from this optimal balance as the majority group tries to crowd out the opinions of the minority. The initial composition of the team can determine whether the dynamics will move toward or away from performance optimality, painting a path-dependent picture of inefficiencies in team compositions. Our results formalize a fundamental limitation of utility-based motivations to drive informational diversity in organizations and hint at interventions that may improve informational diversity and performance simultaneously.

翻译：先前的研究已提供有力证据表明，在组织环境中，能够为任务带来信息与视角多样性的团队比缺乏这种多样性的团队更高效。既然信息多样性形式能带来绩效优势，为何现实中我们常看到高度同质化的团队？一个经典观点认为，信息多样性的益处与亲和偏见存在张力。为深入理解这种张力对团队构成的影响，我们分析了一个序列式团队形成模型：个体既关注团队绩效（基于特征集准确预测未来结果的能力），又因与采用不同预测方法的队友互动而产生成本。对简单模型的分析揭示了团队成长动态中一系列微妙行为：（i）从特定初始团队构成出发，团队可能向更优绩效进步，却在中途陷入次优多样性状态；（ii）从其他初始构成出发，当多数群体试图压制少数群体观点时，团队可能偏离最优平衡态。初始团队构成决定了动态过程是趋近还是偏离绩效最优，呈现出团队构成低效的路径依赖特征。我们的研究结果形式化了组织中以效用动机驱动信息多样性的根本局限，并暗示了能同时提升信息多样性与绩效的干预措施。