Dynamics aspects of diversity influencing group performance at work
By Sergio Valenzuela-Ibarra
This article reviews the main findings around the relationship between diversity and team performance and proposes the study of the diversity dynamics to understand the effects of diversity on team performance. Dynamics of diversity is a concept suggested by this author, and it is understood as the consideration of context, interactions, and evolution of diversity across time.
Nishii and Mayer (2009) investigated the relationship between turnover and group diversity, and the moderator role of an inclusive leader in this relationship. The innovation of their study was to consider separately demographic diversity (visible attributes) and tenure diversity (less visible attribute). Among their findings, the authors found that both kinds of diversity had dissimilar relation to turnover, and that this relationship was moderated in different ways by leadership depending on the kind of diversity (Nishii & Mayer, 2009). The same moderator was used by Stewart and Johnson (2009) to study the relationship between diversity and group performance. They used the leader–member exchange model (LMX) and found that “LMX interacted with work group gender diversity, such that in more gender diverse groups LMX differentiation was positively associated with work group performance when aggregated LMX was high” (Stewart & Johnson, 2009, p.507).
In a similar way, Joshi and Roh (2009) studied the main effects of work team diversity on performance outcomes. Even though they did not find significant correlations between group diversity and performance, the results were different when they analyzed diversity categories (type of diversity) and attributes. The authors classified diversity attributes into two categories: relations-oriented (race/ethnicity, gender, and age) and task-oriented (organizational tenure, education, and functional background). For relations-oriented diversity, they found a very weak negative but significant relationship with performance. On the other hand, the relationship between task-oriented diversity and performance was also very weak but positive and significant. In the case of attributes, they found that functional background diversity was most positively related to performance and that age diversity showed the most negative performance effect (Joshi & Roh, 2009).
The role of the context on diversity is another complex dimension to researchers that has remained systematically unexplored (Haas, 2010). It consists on the influences that group, organizational, and external context produce on diversity. Joshi and Roh (2009) reviewed several studies about team diversity conducted between 1992 and 2008 to identify context moderators or control variables. In a team-level context, research has tackle factors such as task interdependence, task complexity, climate, and other team-level perceptual variables. In an organizational context, studied variables have included organizational demography, diversity training participation, and organizational culture. In the case of extra-organizational context, studies have been conducted in variables such as national culture, customer base demography, market competition, rate of technological change, and industry setting (Joshi & Roh, 2009). In Joshi and Roh (2009), the authors’ interest was to investigate aspects of context at multiple levels and examine whether these contextual factors shaped the diversity-team performance relationship. They proposed that “context can set specific constraints and opportunities that either enhance or minimize the direct effects of work team diversity on performance” (p. 599). In this regards, using the meta-analytic techniques, they not only tested the main effects of work team diversity on performance outcomes, but also the moderating effects of contextual factors embedded at multiple levels.
Kossek, Lobel, and Brown (2006) suggested that diversity researchers should examine the impact of policies not only separately but also in clusters with other Human Resource (HR) practices and strategies. In addition, they proposed that research analyzes “different forms of diversity (e.g. nationality, gender, ethnicity) and how these interact with other important organizational characteristics such as leadership, top management composition, culture, representation across functions and industry key success factors” (p. 69). For example, Chi et al. (2009) studied the moderating role of team-oriented HR practices. They found that these kinds of practices are useful to reduce the negative effect of diversity in teams with high tenure diversity (Chi et al, 2009).
Another dynamic aspect of diversity is its evolution over time (Harrison, Price, Gavin, & Florey, 2002). The point here is if the impact of diversity on team performance changes across time. Winkler and Bouncken (2010) studied cultural diversity and its effect on the innovation process. They found that the effects of diversity on the innovation process vary over time. It is because people who are diverse in terms of culture can learn to work together across time, and then the negative effects of diversity decrease (Winkler & Bouncken, 2010). Another conclusion stated in this study was that diversity affects differently the team performance on each phase of the innovation process. For example, diversity in terms of communication style affects more the performance during the first two phases of the innovation process (idea and feasibility), and diversity in terms of the importance of time (e.g., respect for due time) affects more the latter phases (capability and launch). Finally, they concluded that there are some cultural categories that are more difficult to adapt over time. They called deep-level cultural diversity to these categories. The opposite of these categories were called medium-level cultural diversity. In this sense, according to the propositions “team members in multi-cultural teams adapt their medium-level cultural diversity (language, time importance) during their innovation project and gain strong cultural learning. In contrast, “team members in multi-cultural teams only slowly adapt deep-level cultural diversity (power distance) during their innovation project” (Winkler & Bouncken, 2010, p. 9). These results are consistent to Bouncken’s study (2009) about the surface and deep level effects of cultural diversity. She concluded that surface-level diversity such as work method and communication styles are adapted over time and team members learn to work together. In contrast, deep-level diversity attributes (e.g., power distance) are maintained over time and can cause problems (Bouncken, 2009).
These studies demonstrate that the effects of diversity on team performance are dynamics. These effects are not necessarily linear and depend on several interactions between the attributes of diversity and the context. These interactions and the role of the context can also explain the inconsistent findings in diversity literature. Studies about the effects of diversity on team performance over time are scarce. They are needed to understand the diversity dynamics on team performance.
References
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