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Diversity in the workplace is a common subject for management scholarship, because the issue can be very complex and challenging for managers. One of the lesser-known areas of diversity management is simply dealing with people who have very different personalities. This can be as challenging as managing people from different cultures.
Milliken and Martins (1996), in a relatively early study about managing diversity, note that diversity in group composition affects a number of organizational outcomes, including turnover and performance. Managers needs to be aware of the differences between the group members on key communication issues in particular, for example, affective, cognitive and symbolic processes. There is value in having a high level of diversity, but the team needs strong management that can actively engage with the different types of people within the group, or the group risks being less efficient.
One of the things that management will often do when faced with diverse personality types is to seek to build consensus and get everybody involved and working in the same direction. Harrison (2000) notes that increasing collaboration will enhance the positive effects of deep-level diversity on team outcomes. This points to a strategy of having collaboration...
Richard et al. (2004) showed that risk taking in particular was negatively correlated with relationship patterns. While people can often disagree on other things, and have other types of personality differences and still work well as a team, differences with respect to risk orientation are the most challenging to overcome.
So the research shows that it is challenging to manage people with different personalities, at least when those personalities differ with respect to risk orientation. Other differences can be worked out through greater collaboration, for example, and this probably works because the people can start to understand the perspective of others. With risk, however, it is much harder to understand and respect the perspectives of others, and this presents some unique challenges for managing teams with differing risk orientations.
In the case of Sally and Charlie, it is evident that there is a significant divergence in personalities with respect to risk-taking. Senior management…
References
Milliken, F. & Martins, L. (1996). Searching for common threads: Understanding the multiple effects of diversity in organizational groups. Academy of Management Review. Vol. 21 (2) 402-433.
Harrison, D. (2000). Time, teams and task performance: Changing effects of surface- and deep-level diversity on group functioning. Academy of Management. Retrieved May 5, 2014 from http://www.aom.pace.edu/amj/October2002/harrison.pdf
Richard, O., Barnett, T., Dwyer, S & Chadwick, K. (2004). Cultural diversity in management, firm performance and the moderating role of entrepreneurial orientation dimensions. Academy of Management Journal. Vol. 47 (2) 255-266.
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