Diversity and Work Group Performance
An article out of the Stanford Business School highlights how diversity and work group performance are interlinked. Drawing on research by Margaret Neale, a professor at the business school, the article has important insights for how diverse teams in professional service firms can be made to be more productive.
People often think of diversity as meaning simply an issue of demographics such as gender, age or race. However, groups can be diverse in other ways, too, for instance:
- Informational differences (reflecting a person's education and experience)
- Values and goals (reflecting what behaviour/actions a person believes are desirable/acceptable and what the ultimate strategic/overall intent of the group or firm should be)
Diversity can significantly increase performance in developing creative solutions for out-of-the-ordinary problems such as cracking new markets, adapting to major changes and developing new services. However, it can also reduce performance if the conflicts that it generates are not constructively channeled.
Informational diversity is particularly useful in bringing different perspectives to bear on a problem, uncovering solutions that are not immediately intuitive. On the other hand, demographic diversity can whip up interpersonal conflict as thinking moves from "you think differently to me....." to "I don't like what you think....." to "I don't like you."
The third type of diversity (goals and values) stirs both debate and interpersonal conflict. It is potentially the most damaging of the three. Here, the crux of the solution is to first discuss and understand the differences in values and goals that exist in the group so that differing reactions to ideas that emerge, in turn, can also be understood.
The field research that underpinned the Neale and her colleagues' work found that that the effects of diversity were more pronounced during complicated tasks that required the interdependent work of several groups. The more teams had to work together, the greater the effects the researchers observed.
The researchers also drew on another study that looked at the effect social and informational ties had on how groups shared information. This study set up groups of three people who were told to solve a murder mystery. In each group two members were social friends. The third member was a stranger. In half the groups, the friends had a common piece of information and the stranger was given a piece of unique information essential to solving the problem. In the other groups, one friend and one stranger had common information, while the other friend had the unique information. Which group was more likely to share information more effectively?
The groups with two friends having common information and the stranger with unique information did the most productive information sharing. "Our best guess is that the two friends know each other and expect that they have similar information because of their mutual experience," says Neale. A stranger knows he or she is different and is more likely to share unique information. In groups where one of the friends had ‚Δ®the special information, the friend suppressed the informational difference in order to keep social ties intact, researchers speculate.
Having grown up in a culturally highly diverse society, I'd observe that it is the norm for people of similar backgrounds and cultures to tend to aggregate, even within a diverse larger group. Or for power plays to influence the dynamics within the group very strongly, sometimes completely suppressing good ideas and ultimately the best solution to a problem. Differing values and goals can indeed cause such intense conflict (whether expressed or not) that one side, not understanding the perspectives of the other, discards the other side's input as irrelevant, useless or just plain wrong. To the detriment of that group's ability to solve the problem that faces it.
I'd also observe that it is possible to overcome staggering levels of diversity of all three kinds, to reach solutions that do not fully satisfy everybody, but that everybody can live with. Achieving this kind of consensus is obviously critical to successful strategy execution.
It takes skill and patience to firstly get everybody focused constructively on the problem and then secondly ensure that the inevitable conflict is channeled constructively. (Also to defuse it when it spirals out of control.) Once one looks beyond demographic diversity, it is also easy to see that diversity is far deeper even in professional service firms that at first glance seem collegially and culturally uniform, than one might first imagine.
Hat-tip to MBA Depot.
For more on this topic, see also my recent piece titled Essence of Strategy : Controversial Choices.
Comments, as always, are most welcome and may be posted below.