Psychometric Properties of Measures of Team Diversity With Likert Data

Abstract

Certain diversity among team members is beneficial to the growth of an organization. Multiple measures have been proposed to quantify diversity, although little is known about their psychometric properties. This article proposes several methods to evaluate the unidimensionality and reliability of three measures of diversity. To approximate the interval scale required by the measures of diversity, a transformation on the Likert-item scores is proposed. Ridge maximum likelihood is used to deal with the issue of small sample size, and methods for evaluating the significance of the difference of two reliability estimates with correlated samples are also developed. Results with a real data set on entrepreneurial teams indicate that different measures of diversity may correspond to significantly different estimates of reliability. Results also indicate that diversity measures obtained with the transformed data tend to be more unidimensional than their counterparts obtained from Likert data. However, diversity measures obtained from Likert data tend to yield greater reliability estimates. Among the three examined measures of diversity, the standard deviation is found to yield greater and more efficient reliability estimates than the others and is thus recommended.