According to Margaret A. Neale, the John G. McCoy-Banc One Professor of Organizations and Dispute Resolution, Stanford GSB (Graduate School of Business), workplace diversity across a number of dimensions, like education or personality, improves a group’s performance and creativity.

Dealing with conflict

Neale argues that “the worst kind of group for an organization that wants to be innovative and creative is one in which everyone is alike and gets along too well”, adding that diversity enhances a group’s ability to manage conflict  Tweet This!. As Neale puts it, “the mere presence of diversity you can see, such as a person’s race or gender, actually cues a team in that there’s likely to be differences of opinion. That cuing turns out to enhance the team’s ability to handle conflict, because members expect it and are not surprised when it surfaces”.

Welcoming socially different newcomers

Managers need to occasionally change a group’s composition, welcoming to the group newcomers who are different from the group’s older members, in terms of educational background, area of expertise or other key characteristics:  these newcomers will help the group perform better, especially as regards problem-solving.

What is more, according to Neale, “teams with a very stable membership deteriorate in performance over time because members become too similar in viewpoint to one another or get stuck in ruts”.

Pursuing a lot of diversity

Neale, together with Katherine Phillips of Northwestern and Gregory Northcraft of the University of Illinois, found that when each team member came from a different racial or ethnic group, three-person teams actually performed better. “Two-on-one scenarios with, say, two Caucasians and an African-American, resulted in poorer performance than when the team comprised a Caucasian person, an African-American person, and an Asian-American person,” Neale said.

References:

This article was compiled using a publication by Stanford GSB (Graduate School of Business).  For the sake of readability, we did not use brackets or ellipses but made sure that the extra or missing words did not change the publication’s meaning. If you would like to quote these written sources from the original please revert to the link below:

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/diverse-backgrounds-personalities-can-strengthen-groups

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