Seminar (Dept. of Organization and Human Resources)

Title: Construal Level Diversity in Teams

Speaker: Yi Huang (Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University)

Time: 14:00 (Tuesday), October 17, 2023

Venue: Room 712, Mingde Business Building

Language：Chinese/English

ABSTRACT:

Despite the burgeoning number of studies on team diversity, research regarding deep-level diversity remains sparse. One important deep-level aspect of team members that has not been understood is the construal level, which refers to “the way people encode and retrieve information” (Wiesenfeld et al., 2017: 367). In my dissertation, I investigate the diversity of construal level in teams. Integrating the construal level and the team literature, I first discuss how team members’ trait construal level diversity can have a beneficial influence through high team efficacy but a detrimental influence via high team depletion on team outcomes including performance, creativity, and member satisfaction. Further, I argue that the competing effects can be reconciled by team members’ openness to cognitive diversity and cognitive flexibility. Then, I hypothesize how state construal level diversity in teams changes over time. I tested my hypotheses in two field survey studies. Study 1 included 151 student teams of 6 waves during 6 weeks, and Study 2 included 106 project teams from a Chinese organization of 5 time periods during 5 months. Results consistently illustrated the negative indirect consequences of team trait construal level diversity and suggested an increase of state construal level diversity over time.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY:

Yi HUANG is a PhD candidate in the Division of the Leadership, Management & Organisation at the Nanyang Business School at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Her research interests span the broad areas of (a) diversity in work and entrepreneurial teams, (b) affect and interpersonal work experiences, and (c) affect in entrepreneurship. Her work appears in outlets such as Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Business Venturing, and The Psychology of Entrepreneurship: New Perspectives. Yi has taught Organizational Behavior as an independent instructor at Nanyang Technological University.