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...

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…