The Influence of Gender and Race in Fostering Innovation in Engineering Teams

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The study examines how the interaction of diversity and engineering team dynamics impact innovation in the workplace. The investigators apply the Categorization Elaboration Model (CEM) to investigate why simply including women or racial/ethnic minorities on engineering teams does not lead automatically to greater innovation. The model reconciles the inconsistent literature on team diversity and team performance and addresses the fundamental question of when and how team diversity can have a positive relationship with various indicators of performance such as creativity, innovation, team effectiveness, and performance. The study adds to the research literature by explicitly linking types of team diversity with innovation; simultaneously examining team dynamics, team microclimate, and team cognition to highlight factors that facilitate or impede innovation in diverse teams; adding temporal elements by collecting data over a two-year period; and examining the diversity-innovation process among teams of working engineers in the field. Investigators will use variables such as the value, radicalness, and number of a development team?s patents in emergent technologies. The research findings will influence organizational practices within engineering firms by identifying specific team dynamics and microclimates that facilitate innovation goal achievement by diverse teams.The project is a large scale quantitative survey linking team diversity and team dynamics to team performance and metrics of innovation, primarily patents. The study will collect data from 5,234 engineering alumni who participated in a prior NSF funded longitudinal study about contextual barriers that impact persistence in engineering careers. It will investigate four research questions: (1) What conditions must be in place to facilitate/hinder demographically and informationally diverse teams to produce innovative solutions? (2) What are the underlying mechanisms by which demographically and informationally diverse teams produce innovative solutions? (3) What are the underlying mechanisms that explain the relationship between demographically and informationally diverse teams, information, discussion process, and innovation? and (4) How do these processes vary over the study period of two years? The CEM hypothesizes that it is not direct relationships between gender and racially diverse teams and innovation but factors within the team and team dynamics that influence the relationship between diversity and innovation. The investigators will use hierarchical linear regression, mediation analysis, and ANOVA to test the six hypotheses. The project is supported by the ECR program that emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that generates foundational knowledge in the field. Investments are made in critical areas that are essential, broad and enduring: STEM learning and STEM learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and STEM workforce development. ECR supports the accumulation of robust evidence to inform efforts to understand, build theory to explain, and suggest intervention and innovations to address persistent challenges in STEM interest, education, learning and participation.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.