Our Strength Is In Our Diversity:
Fact Or Fancy?

Effective management of diversity is based on recognition of commonalities and awareness of differences.
Role modeling behaviors of those who readily accept the differences could help alter the organizational culture, and thereby improve perfonnance outcomes. Globalization and diversity have increased the need for investigation into workplace attitudes towards diverse others. In a study of topical relevance, Strauss and Connerley (2003) explored the relationships between race, gender, agreeableness, openness to experience, contact and cognitions, feelings & behaviors. The Universal-Diverse Orientation (UDO) construct was employed as a measure of attitudes towards diversity. This metric has three components: realistic appreciation (cognition), comfort with difference (feeling) and diversity of contact (behavior).

Based on a survey of 252 undergraduate business students from two different institutions in the US, the study found partial support for the hypothesis that women and non-Whites have more positive UDO attitudes.
Gender plays a role only as a first step. Persons who rate high on openness to experience would have more positive
UDO attitudes. Surprisingly, the findings did not support the view that people living in more heterogeneous environments would have more positive UDO attitudes. Contact, gender and race would interact with openness and agreeableness to predict UDO attitudes. Women had more favorable attitudes at high levels of openness than men.
The findings suggest that the cognitive and affective components of UDO attitudes were impacted by agreeableness alone, and the behavioral component was significantly related to race, agreeableness, openness and contact when all variables were included in the model. Agreeableness emerged as the most important predictor of attitudes.

Diversity in business helps in pooling the best talent, reduces the gap between increasingly diverse customer bases, unleashes creativity, promotes innovation and thereby enhances the competitiveness of the organization. Using behavioral interviews, biographical data inventories, assessment centers, work samples etc to assess KSAOs (knowledge, skills, abilities, experiences and other characteristics), this study suggests that effective diversity programs should strike a balance between identifying right KSAOs and implementing them through training. Increased group level diversity does not necessarily lead to higher performance and a diverse group is not always a better-performing group

Employing the idiom of melting pot versus tossed salad, Bachmann (2006) explored what it takes to design an effective multicultural team in the workplace. The study distinguishes between two types of coupling in workgroups: structural and cultural. Structural coupling refers to the task-related domain. and cultural coupling refers to non-task related social domain. The most effective multicultural groups tend to have a tight coupling in task related structural domain and loose coupling in non-task cultural domain. While the former results in consensus, cohesion, effectiveness and stability, the latter leads to diversity, accuracy, creativity and flexibility. Structural coupling could be achieved by clarifying the group's objectives, dividing group tasks into interdependent subtasks, assigning task roles, allocating responsibilities and authority and determining the norms of task related interactions.
The cultural coupling is accomplished by creating an atmosphere of mutual respect and acceptance, and signaling approachability for smoothing differences. In short, an effective workgroup needs to be both a tossed salad and a melting pot for the best possible outcomes.

Diversity-Firm Performance Relationship: The Role of Context
Summarizing the results from 39 studies, Joshi and Roh (2009) in a meta-analytic study explored the role of contextual factors at multiple levels - industry, occupation and team, in influencing performance outcomes of relations-oriented and task-oriented diversity. It was found that although the direct effects of contextual factors were small yet they were significant. After accounting for industry, occupation, and team-level contextual moderators, the effects doubled, and in some cases even tripled, in size. Moreover, occupation and industry-level moderators explained significant variance in effect sizes across studies.

The hypothesized negative effect of gender and race/ethnicity diversity would be weaker in more gender and ethnically balanced settings were confirmed. That the positive performance outcome of task-oriented diversity would be stronger in more balanced occupational settings was disproved implying higher performance outcomes in majority male and white settings. Results also showed that relations-oriented diversity had a positive effect on perfomance in service industries but the support was weak for the moderating effects of the industry setting on the performance outcome of task-oriented diversity. That the negative effects of relations-oriented diversity would be strengthened in long-term teams was also strongly supported.

CONCLUSION

Diversity is no longer conceptualized simply in demographic terms such as race, gender, education, and so on. Even when it is expressed using these parameters, it is no longer uni-dimensional.
Now,task-related diversity and cognitive diversity are more important criteria while attempting to understand workplace diversity and its true implications for firm performance. Thus, task related dimensions e.g., functional background, organizational tenure and experience, social psychological characteristics e.g., agreeableness, openness to experience, contact and cognitions, feelings and behaviors, and team interaction abilities e.g., attitudes towards others, acceptance of differences, etc are equally if not more relevant to assess workplace diversity and explain its influence on performance outcomes.

The impact of workforce diversity, in its richer connotation, on firm performance is no longer considered as linear. . Such effects appear to be stronger in stable rather than in unstable environments.
It has also been observed that the effects of diversity seems to be more pronounced in service industries than in manufacturing industries. This phenomenon might be due to the greater degree of interpersonal interactions in service industries such as hospitality, commercial airlines wherein personalized customer service is likely to influence firm performance.
Diversity by itself alone can not account for differential performance among firms. Certain firm-specific factors such as resources, capabilities, and core competencies are more likely to account for such performance outcomes Diversity that enhances firm resources, capabilities, and core competencies are more likely to lead to superior firm performance.

Journal of Diversity Management - Second Quarter 2010 Volumes 5. Number 2