How Team Diversity Influences Online Medical Team Service Performance Through Shared Leadership: An Input-Process-Output Perspective

The relationship between team diversity and team performance is an essential topic in the literature about working teams, but evidence on the issue is contradictory. It also remains unclear how shared leadership, as a team process, is affected by team composition and eventually affects team performance, especially in the online medical team context. Drawing on the input-process-output framework, this study focuses on online medical teams and investigates the relationships between team diversity, shared leadership, and team service performance, considering the mediating role of shared leadership and the moderating role of team size. Collecting data about online medical teams from a leading online health consultation platform in China, we leverage hierarchical linear models and the bias-corrected bootstrap method to examine our research questions. Our results indicate (1) gender diversity and professional competence diversity negatively influence shared leadership in online medical team service; (2) shared leadership mediates and mitigates the negative effects of gender diversity and professional competence diversity on online medical team service performance; and (3) the negative indirect effect of team diversity (including gender diversity, hospital diversity, professional background diversity, and professional competence diversity) on online medical team service performance via shared leadership is mitigated by team size. The indirect effects of team diversity become significantly positive for large teams. This study highlights the critical role of shared leadership in online medical team service and provides insights into when team diversity would benefit online medical teams. This study offers valuable theoretical and practical implications.