By Alexandra Zatarain

 

There’s more to diversity than what meets the eye.

As diverse teams are quickly becoming a prominent feature in the workplace, understanding the positives and negatives of diversity is becoming more important. In order to do this the first step is attempting to define diversity, a word itself diverse in meanings.

Types of diversity: advantages and disadvantages

Defining diversity is a controversial topic because there are many ways a group’s diversity can be measured. Diversity of appearance, such as demographics, age, sex, and race are the typical way in which diversity is measured. But this touches only one aspect of diversity and does not cover the whole spectrum. The study, “Why Differences Make a Difference: A Field Study of Diversity, Conflict and Performance in Workgroups” by Jehn, Northcraft and Neale, suggests three definitions of diversity:

Social category diversity (diversity is usually defined this way) refers to visible physical differences among individuals, such as race, gender, and ethnicity. These are the differences that are first seen between group members. A higher level of social category diversity increases workgroup satisfaction, intent to remain, and commitment, but it’s also an opportunity for communication conflicts to arise.

Value diversity occurs when members of a workgroup differ in terms of what they think the group’s task, goal, target, or mission should be. Lower levels of value diversity enhance interpersonal relations, bring better workgroup results and decrease conflict, while higher levels could lead to disagreements about delegation and resource allocation.

Informational diversity refers to differences in knowledge and perspectives that members bring to the group. These differences occur because of variations on education, expertise and work experience. They increase the likelihood that diverse perspectives and opinions exist in a workgroup resulting in better performance and productivity, especially when the task is complex.

In the study “Groups of Diverse Problem Solvers Can Outperform Groups of High Ability Solvers”, Scott E. Page defines diversity as “difference of thought”. This study focuses on functional diversity: differences in how people encode problems and attempt to solve them.

Page created a mathematical model to prove that groups of diverse thinkers can outperform groups of high ability thinkers. His results consistently show that highly diverse in thought groups will perform better than groups of high ability solvers. A random collection of intelligent agents outperforms the collection consisting of only the best agents. In order to do so highly diverse groups must maintain similar goal values and perspectives so as to minimize communication conflict.

Another study defines diversity in two ways, surface level diversity and deep level diversity (Carte & Chidambaram, 2004). Surface level diversity is the characteristics that are visible in physical features, and are immediately measured such as age, sex and race/ethnicity. Deep level diversity pertains to characteristics that cannot be observed immediately, and can only be measured through prolonged communication. They are an individual’s values, experiences and attitudes. Surface level diversity tends to increase conflict in the beginning stages of a groups communication while deep level diversity increases amount of information available and thus increases group performance and outcomes.

Setting one definition for what accounts as diversity in the workplace might not be an easy task, but the positive effects of diversity on performance are clear. Still, diversity can bring its own set of problems. Even though a diverse team is capable of outperforming a similar team, that same diverse team may experience difficulties in the process. Highly diverse teams face hurdles precisely because of their strong point, their differences. Thus special attention should be brought to the communication processes within a diverse group.

Diversity brings much more benefits than difficulties and this is the reason why more and more organizations are encouraging a diverse workplace. Minorities have become an asset for companies. And in this matter a question can be raised: if we are diverse to a deeper extent than what meets the eye, can we all be part of a minority?