As a vital driver of team performance, cognitive diversity is of central interest to managers; however, the way in which cognitive diversity promotes superior team performance remains unclear. In this paper, we present a formal model that suggests the existence of the mediating effect of alertness in this relationship. A quantitative method with multiple mediation models was applied to a sample of 1,020 members from 191 teams in China. Our results suggested that cognitive diversity had a significantly positive effect on team performance. Moreover, the mediating effects of the 3 dimensions of alertness (information accumulation, information transformation, and information selection) were verified via a Sobel test. The implications of our findings, the limitations thereof, and possible directions for future research are discussed.
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Liao et al. (2016) studied this question.