The Evolution of Trust and Cooperation in Diverse Groups

Diversity has often been portrayed as a 'double-edged sword' with potentially positive effects on group performance but negative effects on interpersonal relations. The inconsistent findings accumulated by contemporary diversity research raise the question of whether the evidence for the positive and negative effects of diversity can be reconciled and integrated. Recent work has conclusively argued that past research has focused too much on studying the 'main effects' of diversity and neglected to consider the influence of potential moderators that may explain some of the inconsistent findings on the relationship between team diversity and team outcomes. Diversity researchers have therefore called for more attention to moderating variables when developing process models of team diversity. The present work responds to these calls by investigating the effects of group diversity on important predictors of group performance, i.e. the level of behavioral trust and cooperation. Implications for group leaders, managers, and organizations wishing to manage diversity in groups effectively are discussed.

Stefan Volk received his doctoral degree in 2009 from theUniversity of St.Gallen (Switzerland) in International Managementand Organizational Psychology. In 2005 he received aDiplom-Kaufman degree in International Management, InnovationManagement, and Entrepreneurship from Humboldt Universität zuBerlin (Germany).