What about diversity at work
By Sergio Valenzuela-Ibarra
Diversity is defined as the differences among people in terms of several attributes such as age, gender, ethnicity, background, personality, etc. (Knippenberg, De Dreu, & Homan, 2004). Teams in organizations can be more or less diverse in terms of members’ attributes and it is very interesting to researchers to know what the effects of this diversity on the team performance are.
Research on diversity and team performance has revealed inconsistent findings (Van Knippenberg et al., 2004; Palmer, 2006; Chi, Huang, & Lin, 2009). While some studies have concluded that diversity improves teams’ performance because of new ideas, points of view, and in-depth information processing, other studies have found that diversity decreases teams’ performance because of conflicts, communication problems, and social categorization processes. An integrative model called categorization-elaboration model (CEM) was proposed by Van Knippenberg, De Dreu, and Homan (2004). To them, diversity has a positive impact on teams’ performance up to some point, and then more diversity decreases the teams’ performance. It is explained by the interaction between social categorization processes and information processing. At some point “intergroup biases flowing from social categorization disrupt the elaboration (indepth processing) of task-relevant information and perspectives” (Van Knippenberg et al., 2004, p. 1008). Even though this model led us to understand the inconsistent findings in the study of diversity, it gives little information about the dynamics aspects of diversity such as its interactions (e.g., moderator variables), evolution over time, and the influence of the context.
I propose the study of the diversity dynamics to understand the impact of diversity on team performance. Dynamics of diversity is a concept that can be understood as the consideration of context, interactions, and evolution over time when studying diversity and its effects on organizations.
