Diversity

Diversity is an increasingly important factor in organizational life as organizations world-wide become more diverse in terms of the gender, race, ethnicity, age, national origin, and other personal characteristics of their members. By the year 2000, the American workforce is likely to be gender-balanced, with only 58% of the workforce comprised of White, native born Americans (Jackson et al., 1995). Due to the increasing globalization of business requires employees from different cultures to work together in cross-national teams. Firms are being forced to form cross-functional, inter-departmental, cross-divisional, and inter-organizational alliances in order to make maximum use of scarce resources and thus increase their competitive advantage.

People tend to think of diversity as simply demographic, a matter of color, gender, or age. However, groups can be disparate in many ways. Diversity is also based on informational differences, reflecting a person's education and experience, as well as on values or goals that can influence what one perceives to be the mission of something as small as a single meeting or as large as a whole company. Diversity among employees can create better performance when it comes to out-of-the-ordinary creative tasks such as product development or cracking new markets, and managers have been trying to increase diversity to achieve the benefits of innovation and fresh ideas.

Informational diversity stirred constructive conflict, or debate, around the task at hand. That is, people deliberate about the best course of action. On the other hand, demographic diversity can sometimes whip up interpersonal conflict. This is the kind of conflict people should fear.

Another type of diversity is based on goals and values, and it actually generates both types of conflict. This is the most potentially damaging of all the diversities. Without value-goal homogeneity, a team can accomplish little. But once a team recognizes