Team diversity and team helping behavior: The mediating roles of team cooperation and team cohesion

This study regards team helping behavior as a collective phenomenon that happens at the level of work teams. We argue that both the surface-level demographic diversity and deep-level trait diversity of team members are negatively related to team helping behavior. We further argue that team cohesion and cooperation will mediate the effects of team members' demographic characteristics and trait diversity on team helping. Collecting survey data from 558 employees in 133 work teams in Taiwanese firms, we use a hierarchical regression to test our hypotheses and find that they are partially supported. Since some of the hypotheses based on the similarity-attraction perspective were not supported, it appears that not all types of team diversity influence team outcomes in the same way. The widely-accepted similarity-attraction perspective may thus be too broad and too general to explain the effects of team diversity on team processes and outcomes.