Prof. Bertolt Meyer, Professor of Organizational and Business Psychology at Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany, will be visiting us. Prof. Meyer is the Associate Editor of Small Group Research and Frontiers in Psychology (Organizational Psychology section) and has numerous highly cited publications on diversity, stereotypes, psychological well-being at work, leadership, and methods. This year, he was also named University Teacher of the Year by the German University Association.

Research on the consequences on Diversity and Faultlines - hypothetical dividing lines splitting a team into homogeneous subgroups based on multiple attributes - continues to burgeon. I present recent meta-analytic findings on how diversity and faultlines are related, and how faultlines affect team processes. These highlight the role of team members’ perceptions and of team conflict as mediating processes. I subsequently discuss how employees increasingly work across multiple (project) teams and how this challenges core assumptions underlying research on team diversity and faultlines. To address this issue, I introduce the ego-faultlines construct, which construes diversity as a feature of each employees’ specific social environment in the organisation. I discuss potential measurement approaches and how such an individual-level perspective on multi-attribute diversity could advance research on team diversity such that it can be applied to novel contexts.