Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological U., Singapore, Singapore
Despite the burgeoning number of studies on team diversity, research regarding the temporal changes of team diversity remains sparse. A crucial deep-level diversity closely tied to teamwork and subject to temporal changes is construal level diversity, which refers to the differences in how individuals encode and retrieve information. Integrating team and construal level literature, we proposed competing hypotheses regarding the trajectory of state construal level diversity, one suggesting an enlarged diversity, whereas the other suggested a diminished one over time. Additionally, we proposed that team openness to cognitive diversity as a moderating factor of changes in state construal level diversity and argued that the average of state construal level diversity would be positively associated with team performance via team efficacy. We tested hypotheses with two longitudinal studies. Study 1 included 158 student teams with four-wave surveys over six weeks, and Study 2 included 106 project teams from a Chinese organization with four-wave surveys over four months. Results consistently revealed an increase in state construal level diversity over time, especially for teams with a higher openness to cognitive diversity. Such an increase in state construal level diversity was beneficial as the average of state construal level diversity was positively associated with team performance via team efficacy. We discussed theoretical and practical implications and called more attention to the temporal dynamics of deep-level team diversity.
