How Diversity Functions in the Organization

Simons and Rowland (2011) seek to explore the difference between functional and social diversity in organizations. They begin with the premise that the existing literature does not adequately explore the differences between these two types of diversity. So the first issue that they raise is with respect to solidifying a definition for the two concepts. In this way, the basic concept is to examine the existing studies to "identify areas of improvement (that) could be made in the existing literature regarding the discussion of diversity in order to improve its impact on the expected organizational outcomes."

The start by breaking down the perspectives on diversity into the information and decision-making perspectives and the social organization perspectives. The core premise of these two different perspectives is that there is diversity of different cultures and ethnicities on one hand, but on the other hand there are also in-group differences with respect to how people conceptualize problems and deal with work in general.

This perspective, the information and decision-making perspective, holds the view that there is evidence from a wide range of team types that diversity in teams can be just as high with a team full of people of the same cultural background. Organizations can encourage the hiring of people with different styles of conducting their work as a means of reducing conformity to social norms. Decision-making is improved if there are different perspectives with respect to things like problem-solving, information gathering and final decision decision-making heuristics, and diversity in this respect has little to do with ethnic heterogeneity.

The social organization perspective views diversity through the lens of social groups – ethnic, religious and other more visual differences. This contrasts with the information and decision-making view to some extent, because it focuses more strictly on visible differences between group members. The underlying assumption of this perspective is that people of different cultures are going to inherently have different ways of doing things and different perspectives. Essentially, race, religion and gender are used as proxies for different types of perspectives.

A third view is the flexibility argument, which the authors state "indicates that multicultural management practices would result in changes that meant that the system will become less determinant, less standardized and therefore more fluid." Thus, there are different views of diversity from which human resources organization can draw from. The social organization perspective doubtless arose as the result of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which specifically barred discrimination of specific peoples on the basis of social organization, essentially compelling organization to become less visually homogenous. The literature basically backfilled the argument that adding visible diversity would result in different viewpoints and perspectives on things like decision-making.

The information and decision-making perspective is a little bit more sophisticated because diversity is not as obvious to the outsider, but can still be readily understood by human resources departments and managements that understand their personnel. These groups understand that there are different ways of doing things, and that visual characteristics are not necessarily the best –or at least not the only - way to understand that. This perspective does not assume that people of different social organization are necessarily different, nor does it accept the assume that a visibly homogenous group of people are necessarily the same in terms of how they do things. Most modern organizations recognize that the truth is somewhere in the middle – especially in the world's larger, more diverse immigrant cities where ethnic or religious background is no indicator of one's birthplace or adherence to local cultural norms.

The authors discuss the apparent conflict between the two perspectives. They contrast the similarity attraction paradigm wherein groups that are similar tend to gravitate towards one another, and end up having rapid decision-making processes, whereas cognitive diversity theory holds that some cognitive friction is good for organizations – a multiplicity of viewpoints will result in better decision-making skills overall.

These two underlying explanations of how diversity functions within a society are important because they reflect the trade-off with diversity in general, and thus influence how an organization wants to conceptualize diversity. A more homogenous group can work more quickly, with less conflict, but there are situations where more conflict is beneficial because it will overall result in better-decision making. Thus, there is a tendency for people to self-select into teams where there is little information and decision-making diversity because it is easier, but there is benefit to organization seeking to disrupt this paradigm in order to create a certain amount of conflict – in terms of people expressing their different perspectives – in order to vet ideas, and introduce checks to bad ideas being promoted through groupthink because the group has little conflict.

The authors also recognize that there is room for both perspectives to be correct – that there are definitely instances where social organization diversity can lead to diversity of information processing and decision-making, but that this is not the only way that diversity can be achieved, and that there is merit to things like cross-functional teams as a means of creating diversity of information processing and decision-making. The authors conclude by noting that the different conceptualizations of diversity, often lead to confusion in organization as to what diversity is, and why it is valuable, as mixed implementation can often lead to uncertainty about the results of diversity initiatives.

References

Simons, S. & Rowland, K. (2011) Diversity and its impact on organizational performance: The influence of diversity constructions on expectations and outcomes. Journal of Technology Management and Innovation Vol. 6 (3) 171-182.