Organizations in every sector are increasingly using teams to perform many different functions, including to solve problems, create new products and deliver essential services. Teams are potentially valuable because they can serve as a vehicle for combining and using a wide variety of information, expertise and perspectives, adapting effectively to environmental changes. However, many teams struggle to integrate their valuable but diverse inputs. Often, when considering the challenges of diversity, people often think about the issues related to race, culture, and other demographic differences, but it turns out that even individuals who seem similar in these respects can struggle to understand each other and collaborate, for reasons that are not clear to observers and thus hard to address. My research project is motivated by the overarching question “How can we help team members understand each other and build new knowledge?” To find answers to that question, in collaboration with computer scientists, I will develop better tools to capture the quality of team discussion and collaboration in order to help identify the hidden factors that contribute to or disrupt these integral team processes for performance. I will use these tools and investigate two influential inputs to team design (collecting data from the field and laboratory experiments), including: (a) particular combinations of individual characteristics that enhance or inhibit the quality of team interaction; and (b) organizational structures that facilitate or impede the interaction of members. Both of these essential inputs are features that leaders can directly influence in composing and structuring teams, and are thus potential highly valuable elements for organizations to understand and manage.