The impact of team diversity on performance remains unclear, according to two University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professors. To clarify things, they looked through 43 studies done in organizations (not lab or classroom studies) published between 1992 and 2008. These tested both "relations-oriented" diversity, meaning traits like race and gender, and "task-oriented" diversity "such as education, function, and tenure."
The direct effects of each type on performance were positive for task-oriented diversity and negative for relations-oriented. But both effects were weak and varied widely across studies, suggesting that a lot of factors can make things better or worse. For example, gender- or race-diverse teams performed worse if their occupations were dominated by gender or racial groups. Since most computer programmers in America are white men, for example, programmer teams that had a mix of men and women or of blacks and whites probably would not perform as well. By the same token, since most nurses are female, nursing teams with more men than normal would not do as well as all-female teams, either.
Relations diversity had a positive impact on team performance in service industries (banking and restaurants) but negative impacts in manufacturing and IT. Task-oriented diversity was helpful in all industries. But it improved performance more in companies with less racial or gender diversity. Relations diversity also hurt performance when team members had to cooperate a lot to accomplish work, while helping it in low-cooperation teams. Task-oriented diversity became more helpful as the need for cooperation increased.
Also, short-term project teams did much better when they were relations-diverse, while longer-lived teams did worse. But the effect of task-oriented diversity did not differ much based on length of team life. In short, you cannot just say the task-based diversity always helps and demographic diversity always hurts.
This complexity suggests, though, that it is the attitudes of the majority members that cause the problems, not bad performance by the minorities. In situations where relations diversity hurts performance, the authors said, "interventions aimed directly at… behaviors driven by stereotype and bias… and ensuring (diversity) at higher levels may be necessary to reverse negative diversity-based outcomes." Increasing diversity in the applicant pool, and hence the company, is another tactic they mention. They also wrote, "Teams performing more interdependent tasks over the long term may need ongoing training interventions or team coaching that facilitates group decision making and conflict resolution," especially in occupations that have less diversity.
Source: Joshi, A., and H. Roh (09), "The Role of Context in Work Team Diversity Research: A Meta-Analytic Review." Academy of Management Journal 22(3):599.
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© 2010 by Jim Morgan. All rights reserved.