When Team Science Meets Belonging

This isn’t the piece I originally wrote about anti-racist teams. But returning to that work gave me room to think—about DEI, about team science, and about how the conversation between those two bodies of research has evolved. What follows isn’t a conclusion about what creates belonging on teams, it more of a bridge. It’s a reflection on how team science and DEIB research have been framed—and how the conversational push and pull between them has, at times, moved the work forward, and at other times

constrained it in important ways.

Anything that feels uncomfortable is usually worth doing. So despite the nerves, here’s what I brought to the table for my students—and what I’m bringing here.

1. The Scientific Foothold

As group and team research gained legitimacy, it created a language organizations were already willing to hear—ROI, performance, outcomes. That language became a scientific foothold for DEIB work. Concepts like psychological safety, voice, belonging, and norms could now be discussed not just as moral imperatives, but as factors that influenced team effectiveness. This mattered. It made it harder to argue that exclusionary environments were simply “neutral” or “the way things are.” DEI didn’t enter organizations because of morality—it entered because of performance. And that origin both helped it survive and limited how far it could go.

2. How the Work Learned to Speak

In this context, DEIB made sense through teams. Teams became one of the clearest, safest places to talk about inclusion because belonging could be linked to performance without too much resistance. But that also meant the work had to speak the language of productivity to be heard. Team science didn’t just support DEIB—it shaped it. It influenced which questions were asked, which outcomes were measured, and which forms of inclusion were deemed legitimate.

3. The Sadness of the “Business Case”

There’s something quietly sad about that. That progress toward inclusion often depends on whether it can be justified through output and performance, rather than through a commitment to human dignity and fairness on their own. This framing moved the work forward in some dimensions—visibility, funding, uptake—while simultaneously narrowing it in others. Not everything that matters can be cleanly tied to productivity, and not every cost shows up on a dashboard.

4. The Unasked Question in Teams

Team research has taught us a lot about how to perform well together. But one question still sits at the margins of both team science and DEIB research:

Who tends to pay the cost of making teams work—and who gets the credit?

When inclusion is conditional on productivity, it’s often incomplete. Someone is usually carrying invisible labor: emotional regulation, translation, smoothing conflict, absorbing risk. That work keeps teams functional, but it’s rarely named, rewarded, or evenly distributed. If we only study outcomes without interrogating cost, we miss something essential.

I’m sharing this because if I ask my students to be brave enough to interrupt bias, I have to be brave enough to think—and post—out loud about the structures and frames that shape this work.