NASA& #39;s Human Integration Design Handbook has a really interesting and nuanced section on cultural diversity on teams. A quick thread:
Diversity creates positive and negative effects. Partially this depends on the type of diversity. Diversity on deeply-held values and beliefs is associated with increased conflict which can affect performance. This problem actually *gets worse* over time.
"Surface differences" like age, gender, ethnicity, marital status, have diminishing effects over time.
What kind of diversity do you really want for complex non-routine tasks? "Functional diversity" - diverse perspectives based on thorough examination. For superior task performance, you want disagreement about ideas, not personal relationships or values.
Even in that case, you don& #39;t want too much conflict over how to do things, because that& #39;ll decrease task performance.

Additionally, to reap the benefits of diversity, you have to make an active effort to mitigate the likelihood of relational conflict and communication issues.
In short - diversity is good, but some types are more valuable than others, and in general it isn& #39;t a plug-and-play feature for team creation. To get the benefit, you have to select carefully, then watch out for common problems.
With all that said, I think it& #39;s good for diverse people to get together to talk, but apparently it& #39;s not always the way to go if you& #39;re trying to solve a complicated work task or work well in a high stress environment.
Source for all of this is NASA HIDH, section 5.8.3.1.4.2 - https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/human_integration_design_handbook_revision_1.pdf

It& #39;s">https://www.nasa.gov/sites/def... very well-sourced if you want to dig in!
Addendum:

For the record, this info presents all sorts of ideas for bad hot takes, but hey, let& #39;s stick to the data which is nuanced and kind of boring!
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