Growing up in a black neighborhood of Chicago, Katherine W. Phillips was chosen in third grade to attend a nearly all-white magnet school. “I was introduced at a young age to diversity, to difference, to ignorance,” she later recalled.

The experience inspired a lifelong quest to delve into the specifics of how and why racially and ethnically diverse groups function differently than homogeneous ones. As a professor, most recently at Columbia Business School, she analyzed the ways that organizations, especially in their workplaces, can maximize the benefits of hiring employees with different backgrounds.

“The first thing to acknowledge about diversity is that it can be difficult,” Professor Phillips wrote in a 2014 essay for Scientific American. Diversity often provokes discomfort, conflict and more challenging interactions, she acknowledged.

But that friction frequently leads to better outcomes, as she demonstrated through experiments and groundbreaking empirical research. People in diverse groups work harder, share information more broadly and consider a wider range of views than those of just one race, culture or gender, she found.