NotedSource

A conversation with Jennifer Feitosa, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychological Science and researcher at the frontier of team science.

About Jennifer Feitosa, Ph.D.

Jennifer Feitosa, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Psychological Science at Claremont McKenna College, a Fulbright U.S. Scholar, and Director of the METRICS Lab. Her research focuses on teamwork, diversity, and measurement, with an emphasis on how to maximize the benefits of diversity in teams. Her work has been widely published in leading journals and presented over 100 times at conferences, and she serves on the editorial boards of Small Group Research and the Journal of Business and Psychology.

Diversity Isn’t a Checkbox — It’s a Moving Target

When organizations talk about diversity, they tend to think in snapshots — a headcount here, a demographic breakdown there. But Jennifer Feitosa is pushing the field toward something far more nuanced: a dynamic, evolving understanding of what diverse teams actually look like in practice, and what it truly takes to make them work.

The central challenge she’s focused on is helping organizations more precisely define, measure, and operationalize what “diverse team” really means. Despite decades of research, significant corporate investment, and no shortage of public debate, most organizations are still working with definitions that are too broad to be useful. When diversity means everything, it becomes hard to align strategy around it, hard to measure progress, and even harder to design interventions that produce real, lasting change.

But the conceptual problem runs even deeper than definition. Most frameworks treat diversity as a fixed attribute — something a team either has or doesn’t have. The reality is far more complex. Diversity is not a static characteristic; it evolves continuously as team membership shifts, roles change, identities develop, and interactions accumulate over time. A team that looks diverse on paper at the start of a project may function very differently six months in, after turnover, reorganization, or a shift in team dynamics.

This is why Dr. Feitosa is calling for a fundamentally different approach — one built on dynamic models, more sophisticated measurement tools, and longitudinal research designs that can capture how diversity actually unfolds over time. The goal is to finally close the scientist-practitioner gap: to take what rigorous research knows about diverse teams and translate it into tools and frameworks that organizations can actually use.

AI Is Reshaping Teams — and Most Leaders Aren’t Watching the Right Thing

Ask any R&D leader about emerging trends and AI will top the list. But while the conversation around artificial intelligence tends to focus on productivity, automation, and competitive advantage, Dr. Feitosa sees a more subtle — and potentially more consequential — disruption happening beneath the surface. And most organizations aren’t paying attention to it.

The deeper challenge isn’t what AI can do for teams. It’s what AI is doing to them.

We’re beginning to see early research on how trust is built between humans and AI systems — how people decide whether to rely on an algorithm, delegate a decision, or override a recommendation. That’s important work. But it leaves a critical question largely unanswered: how does the presence of AI change the way human team members trust each other?

When an AI system mediates communication, surfaces information selectively, or influences how credit and accountability are assigned, it doesn’t just change workflows — it changes relationships. It shifts the invisible social fabric that holds teams together. And yet organizations are rolling out AI tools at speed, largely without frameworks to understand or manage these effects.

The result, as Dr. Feitosa puts it, is that we’re flying blindly. The assumptions and models that have guided team effectiveness for decades were built in a world without AI teammates. Some of those lessons will hold. Many will need to be fundamentally revisited. The risk isn’t that AI will replace human teams — it’s that we’ll keep managing AI-integrated teams as if nothing has changed, and wonder why the old approaches aren’t working.

Where Rigorous Science Meets Real Organizational Challenges

For researchers like Dr. Feitosa who believe deeply in the scientist-practitioner model, there has always been a frustrating gap between what the research says and what actually gets implemented in organizations. The science exists. The evidence is there. But translating it into something a real organization can act on — that’s where the work often stalls.

NotedSource has offered a different path. By connecting academic researchers with industry partners, the platform creates the conditions for the kind of collaboration that actually bridges that gap. It’s not just about access to new opportunities — it’s about the quality of the process: the iterative, back-and-forth nature of working through a real organizational problem together. Refining content through multiple rounds of feedback. Wrestling with the tension between scientific rigor and practical constraints. Co-developing solutions that neither side could have produced alone.

In one recent project, Dr. Feitosa contributed to strengthening a workplace training program by embedding psychological science on incivility, stereotypes, and inclusion — translating research concepts into content that could actually reach employees and change behavior, while staying grounded in the organizational realities the company was navigating.

That’s what the scientist-practitioner model looks like at its best: not research handed over a wall to practitioners, but genuine collaboration that makes the science sharper and the practice more effective. NotedSource has proven to be a platform where that kind of partnership is not just possible — it’s the whole point.

Work with experts like Dr. Feitosa on your toughest organizational challenges.

The questions shaping the future of work — how to build truly effective diverse teams, how to navigate the human impact of AI, how to turn research into action — don’t have easy answers. But they have experts.

NotedSource connects companies and R&D leaders with world-class academic researchers who specialize in exactly the problems you’re trying to solve. Whether you’re designing a training program, rethinking your team structure, or trying to get ahead of where AI is taking your organization, the right research partner can make all the difference.