A special effort is being made in higher education to adapt to the dynamics required by business management. Teamwork is a priority in business environments so it should also be one among university students. Team diversity and its links to performance comprise one of the aspects most widely worked on, but outcomes are still inconsistent.

In this paper we advance the understanding of the relationship between team diversity and performance in two ways: first by blending the two main theoretical approaches (social categorization holding that diversity has a negative effect on team performance versus information/decision-making-based theories that hold the opposite), taking conflict as a mediator variable; and second by contextualizing the link through a contingency approach in which initial within-group cohesion, strength of leadership, and prior experience of group members in working as a group are taken as significant moderator variables. We base our work on an Input-Mediator-Outcome model framework and blend it with a Categorization-Elaboration Model.

The results show that only in the right context (group cohesion, strength of leadership, and prior experience of group members) can diversity produce improvements in the performance of working teams.

高等教育正在做出特殊努力，以适应业务管理所需的动力。团队合作是商业环境中的优先事项，因此它也应该是大学生中的一种。团队的多样性及其与绩效的联系构成了工作最广泛的方面之一，但结果仍然不一致。

在本文中，我们以两种方式提高了对团队多样性与绩效之间关系的理解：首先通过融合两种主要的理论方法（社会分类认为多样性会对团队绩效产生负面影响，而基于信息/决策制定的理论则对团队绩效产生负面影响。相反），将冲突作为调解变量; 其次，通过权变方法将链接关联起来，其中初始的团队内部凝聚力，领导力和小组成员在小组工作中的先前经验被视为重要的主持人变量。我们的工作基于“输入—调解—结果”模型框架，并将其与“分类-阐述”模型融合在一起。

结果表明，只有在正确的背景下（团队凝聚力，领导才能和团队成员的先前经验），多样性才能改善工作团队的绩效。