How to Make the Team: Social Networks vs. Demography as Criteria for Designing Effective Teams

We compare two alternative approaches for evaluating the potential of a work group or team: one that focuses on team members' demographic characteristics and one that focuses on the members' social networks. Given that people's network contacts often share their demographic attributes (i.e., the network is homophilous), the two approaches seem equivalent and the first seems preferable because it is easier to implement. In this paper, we...