An influence analysis of diversity and collective cardinality on collective performance

This paper presents a general framework to demonstrate the prominent role of diversity in the effectiveness of collective performance. There appears to be ample evidence that diversity is one of the essential criteria of which a collective to be intelligent. Intuitively, a collective involving diverse individuals may add new information, new perspectives, and so forth on the problem that needs to be solved. Moreover, the diversity of individual solutions to the given problem has been proven helpful in eliminating the phenomenon of correlated errors. The objective of the paper is to investigate the influence of the latter kind of diversity on the collective performance by taking into account the collective cardinality. Our findings qualify the positive impact of diversity on collective performance. Particularly, collectives with higher diversity levels will lead to better collective performances. Subsequently, expanding the collective cardinality that causes an increase in its diversity will also be positively associated with the collective performance. With some restrictions, the hypothesis the more diverse the collective, the higher the collective performance is formally proved. Furthermore, the conditions under which increasing the cardinality of a collective will cause its diversity to be increased (or decreased) are worked out. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.