Managing team diversity in organizational leadership

Team Leadership Issue: Managing Diversity

Team Diversity

Jackson in his article claims team diversity is the even distribution of personnel attributes among interdependent members of a work unit (Jackson, 2003). The attributes encompass a wide range of issues ranging from gender, culture, and ethnicity, inclusive of skills, experiences, and education obtained by the team members. The diverse traits of the team members can either build or break the entire team in attaining set goals and objectives.

Managing workplace diversity in the modern world is of significant importance to organizations in the competitive business world. In line with this, upholding team honesty as well as initiating channels for positive feedback ensures the team remains united and is the preferred strategy by most firms; this builds trust among the team members allowing them to raise potentially awkward issues affecting them. However, the team should create communication guidelines to minimize chances of miscommunication based in cultural misunderstandings. The potential outcome of disrespecting cultural norms results into ineffective team atmospheres; this causes intra-team conflicts thus, the organization's goals cannot be achieved.

Having a highly heterogeneous team is really innovative to the organization; however, the diversity is likely to collapse due to the varying viewpoints of the members, ultimately lowering the firms' innovativeness. On the other hand, highly homogenous teams have like-minded members and are not prone to disintegration though, they often lack innovative initiatives.

Best Practices for Team Performance

Poorly managing team diversity precipitates team dysfunction resulting in polarization of personal politics within the team; this disorients the team's members thus, their productivity diminishes and the group ultimately collapses. Freidman (2005) captures this by proclaiming that, "For those in the 'in crowd,' there may be a sense of community and intimacy and for those in the 'out crowd' however, there may be a sense of isolation, loneliness and even bitterness" (Friedman 2005). As a result of the persistent isolation and disunity in the team, highly talented individuals are likely to leave the organization and besides, legal issues arise if the firm is found propagating a hostile work environment for workers.

Due to the ever increasing management issues, most firms have initiated several strategies for managing diversity including; sensitivity training during orientation, ensuring members of discriminated-against groups establish a friendly support networks. The other is raising general awareness via public affirmations of diversity by the firm's manager. In addition, for expatriate leaders in multinational organizations, self-awareness is essential when dealing with employees of different cultural background than them.

As a concern, organizations' managers have the responsibility of using team members' diverse gifts, abilities, and skills to achieve set goals (Shipp, 2012). This requires active management by the leader to ensure the team members respect and accept new members who are different in one way or another. In addition, establishing a business environment encouraging diversity ensures members accept each other and help them achieve their ambitions.

The diversity mix of the personnel attributes would depend on what the team is put together to achieve. For example, it was found that Top Management Team's tenure diversity increased the likelihood of investing in new geographic areas (Barkema, 2007). For a company to strategically innovate in new areas, new team members would need to be added regularly to provide fresh new views and promote constructive debate from the different experiences, skill, networks, and views that would foster strategic innovation for the company.

Key factors of a well-diversified team include "trust, team spirit, unified commitment, principled leadership, evaluation goals, results-driven structure, standards of excellence, participation in decision making, external support and recognition, and an aptitude to adjust roles and behaviors to accommodate new values" (Basset-Jones, 2005). The team should be able to recognize strengths and weaknesses and be able to adjust behavior to respond to needs where all team members are mutually adjustable. The levels of quality output are the results of employee skill and knowledge rather than supervision. Creativity and problem solving capabilities are enhanced with a combination of diversity, individual strengths and weaknesses, and working relationships.

To successfully promote creativity and innovation, an association with management of work routines and the creation of appropriate teams would be required. A team leader enables the other members to be innovative as well as self-directed within the capacity of individual assignments by allowing them to learn from their own successes, mistakes and failures. It is important to assure that each individual on the team has the opportunity to make the maximum contribution to the success of the team by doing the type of work for which they have the greatest opportunity for productivity and achievement. This would help to consider the functional competence, preferences to different types of work, and different types of work context. It would require an adequate balance of work preferences, attitude to risk, and an inclusive orientation to social identity.

Recommendations and Conclusion

Several researches have been initiated to help in understanding diversity; but, they have led to different and contrasting opinions on the complex relationship between team diversity and team outcomes. However, the impact of team diversity on team outcomes and factors affecting this relationship remain unanswered by the above literatures' findings. The above analysis ascertains that there is a positive correlation between task-related diversity on team performance although bio-demographic diversity is insignificantly linked to team performance. Besides, there is no distinct effect of team diversity on social integration. Thus, from these implications, there is need for further research on diversity and its impacts on organizations.

There are several recommendations organizations are supposed to initiate concerning team diversity. First, the organizations should be clear on why you want to promote diversity and inclusiveness. The major reason for upholding diversity should be to attract and retain talent within the organization. As a result of this, retaining the required talent ensures productivity which ultimately attracts a wide customer base ensuring the firm remains competitive in the market.

Despite the several differences portrayed in the literatures, the organization should respect the team members' differences. The organization should not assume that different ways of working are wrong but, they should initiate the members are self-aware; the members should be allowed to think how their own background steers their working style, what they consider the norm may not seem normal to others and they should not be disregarded by the firm.

The next recommendation is appreciating individuals as they are as opposed to stereotyping them based on their cultural backgrounds and age. In addition, the differences should not be overlooked since they may result in misunderstanding. This fosters good working conditions as well as communication. To ensure this, employee training should be highly prioritized to minimize chances of miscommunication among the team members.