Unpacking Participation And Influence: Diversity'S Countervailing Effects On Expertise Use In Groups

Although organizations frequently use groups to solve complex problems, groups often fail to use all available expertise, thus generating suboptimal solutions. To better understand why this occurs, we distinguish between two processes that are related to expertise use but often empirically conflated: participation and influence. Using detailed process data from a laboratory study of 544 individualsworking in 136 four-person groups, we find group members with relatively more expertise tend to participate more and have more influence. However, we find dissimilarity from the rest of the group (in terms of gender) disrupts the relationship between individual expertise and participation. Simultaneously, conditional on participation, the same dissimilarity strengthens the relationship between expertise and influence. These patterns aggregate such that group diversity (again, in terms of gender) affects group performance in opposing ways-detracting from the alignment between group member expertise and participation but enhancing the alignment between group member expertise and influence, resulting in an overall null effect of group diversity on group performance. We also explore the effects of race diversity on participation and influence. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for research on diversity and intragroup processes.