Diversity in a Small Group

Diversity is an integral factor, which promotes and helps stimulate an open society where ideas and reciprocal efforts can lead to a group’s success. Nothing can healthily succeed or prosper with only one element. As in cooking, construction, and the labor force, recipes, establishments, and the collective thought processes of humankind and evolutionary thought are best developed when there is a multinational and varying ethnic supplement of ideas and efforts. When people are not able to support and work in a diverse environment, workforce problems and stagnant thought will occur. This paper will aid in shedding some light on the murky and turbulent area of diversity, what it encompasses, and whom it affects.

Different personality traits exist within all individuals. At times, personality traits will be similar between members of a group. This could help the members of a group to relate to one another. However, differences in personalities could be good as well. People do not need to have the same personality traits in order to work together as a team. In fact, diversity can enhance the team. Each member of our group is very different, but there is one trait we definitely have in common: we all understand the importance of humor. In all of our presentations so far, we have used humor as a way to connect to our audience. We feel that we can still be professional without being boring, and humor is a way to make the presentations more interesting. It (what is “It”?) also helps us relate at our learning team meetings. Not all members of our group are humorous individuals; however, humor has become a big part of our group, and a part of our “team personality”.

The aspect of diversity within our learning team with regards to our geographical differences is something that we are going to explore throughout the course of Organizational Behavior. Up until this class, we have experienced togetherness in proximity and organizational behavior. As a learning team, our geographical similarities (“our geographical similarities” is not your learning team) brought us together from the first class where we all met. It has been the glue that keeps us together when other issues of diversity arise. We are all located in the north county within a twenty-mile radius of one another. The convenience of our proximity has allowed for relaxed and enjoyable meetings that foster open communication and enriched brainstorming. As a group, we can all share the burden of hosting our team, and find that we quickly agree on places to meet for productive interaction.

Our challenge for this course will be to accept the growing diversity within our team as we allow a new member to permeate our fortified alliance. We have accepted Prince as our newest member and the geographical difference that he brings to our circle. He more than doubles the radius of our geographical proximity. Therefore, he widens the spectrum for the diversity within our team in many aspects. This will create new challenges and cause us to grow in our problem-solving skills as a team. We invite the challenges, but acknowledge the difficulty that it will bring. As a group we will all have to expand our communication skills to include more computer time and emailing. We have discussed the limitations that phone meeting and emails present, so we must devise new ways to keep optimal communication, without allowing any one of us to feel left out of the circle.

Age has a great impact on the dynamics and viewpoints of our group. Our group being all around the same general age has a great advantage. We all are at about the same place in our lives, starting families, beginning years of marriage or deciding whether to get married. This allows us to work together with great ease and be able to be more comfortable sharing with each other because we have a better understanding as to where we all are personally. It also allows us to have a lot of fun while together and we have developed friendships outside of school. These friendships have strengthened our team. Being at the same place in our lives, we are all hoping to achieve some of the same goals and can support one another in achieving them. With the positives, there are also negatives. The down side to being all around the same age is that we cannot pull from pervious generations for input. The way this has affected us the most was in our last class. We were in a class with a group that contained members in there thirties through their fifties. All of us being in our twenties, we had a different view on what we wanted to achieve from the class. We came up with a business that would create fantasy parties for our customers. We got really involved in presenting our business in an exciting manner, because our business was all about fun. The presentation did not go over well with the older group, whose opinion of a business was strictly focused on professionalism and delivering presentations that could bore a crowd into a deep sleep. From that class, we gained what older generations view as professional and how groups should present their speeches in class. Being younger does not give us a lack of personal experiences but it does limit us to the knowledge of only the world experiences that took place in our lifetime.

Another area of impact where our diversity will impact our team’s effectiveness is the area of gender. Our team diversity has changed this class with the addition of our new team member Prince. In the past, our group consisted of one male and three females. The addition of a second male will impact how our team communicates. During previous oral presentations, Matt was often seen as a dominant figure as he towered over the other group members and his baritone voice carried better. With the addition of Prince, the overshadowing caused by a single male will be dispersed, hopefully allowing more attention to the rest of the team. While the addition of Prince does bring better gender diversity, it may also lead to conflict. It is possible that a top rooster syndrome may develop if either Matt or Prince vies for leadership of the group. The addition of Prince to the learning team has another beneficial effect. It brings better balance to the team. Before, Matt was outnumbered three to one, and as such conversation often drifted to off-topics such as childbirth, breast-feeding or problems with husbands. With Prince as a second male in the group, conversation may be more restrained to subject matter pertaining to our schoolwork. On the other hand, it is possible that a second male may allow for whole new areas of counter productive male-based communication between Matt and Prince. The gender diversity our group has can be a weakness, though through understanding we can make our diversity one of our greatest strengths.

I (Who is I?) can recall two examples where a lack of diversity and acceptance towards diversity will work adversely towards personal goals and the benefit of an entire company. A PhD in astrophysics was applying for the NASA space shuttle program to conduct orbital research. He was fully qualified but was continually passed over. He was a known supremacist with current and traceable affiliations. That, obviously, would not propagate the International Space Station ideas and principles. (This paragraph doesn’t flow with the rest of the paper.)

Recently, a former employee in some management position for a well-known cola corporation left and reported discrimination against people of color in that company. It is very unfortunate that diversity is most commonly associated with the racial aspect and not according to, say, diversity in one’s workout regime or photographic collection. In the world that we live in, both past and present, we cannot seem to move past the impediment ones racial, gender, and sexual affiliation causes in others. We must intrinsically accept diversity in all aspects of life, instead of just at the restaurants. You are not making any changes or building bridges just because you eat at an ethnic restaurant or listen to another group’s music.

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Diversity in Organisations

Within every organizational group, there is a degree of diversity that exists. This article addresses the issue of diversity and introduces a new concept of group composition called faultlines. This concept depends on the position of characteristics held by every individual member within the organisational group. If there is strong faultlines within a group i.e. members in the group are similar in many ways, the group is able to work together easily to shorten the processes and initial stages of a project. However, the existence of strong faultlines can also be a disadvantage as it restricts creativity and maximises the chance of group conflicts. The article applies the theory of faultlines to the development of an organisational group and discusses the various outcomes.

The creation of the theory of faultlines is very successful in that it can be applied to any group situation and gives a good understanding of the diversity an organisational group can contain. This article portrays this theory clearly and orderly, however, was found to be very repetitive in certain areas.

Empirical studies on managing conflict.

The basic outline of this article deals with managing conflict within an organisational group. It can be seen from article 1 that when there is diversity in a group, there will always be conflict. The idea of dispute in an organisational group however, is argued in this article. The question raised is whether a moderate level of dispute is desirable in order to enhance learning and effectiveness in an organization. It can be seen that when there is a weak faultline within a group i.e. that there is minimal similarities throughout the group, more cases of conflict will arise and it is important to understand how to control this problem to avoid dysfunction.

The main advantage to this article is that it is short and to the point and addresses the important issues dealing with group conflict. However, the weakness in the article is that the conclusion is vague, which is a major down point.

Cross-functional project groups in research.

The idea of cross-functional project groups within organizations is examined in this article. The term ‘cross-functional group’ is used meaning a group consisting of a number of members all from different functional areas of the organization. This can be related back to articles 1 and 2 in that these groups show a wide range of diversity, which in turn will cause conflict. However, it was discovered in this article that cross-functional group work has many advantages. Multiple sources of communication, maximised creativity, increased number of contacts outside the group and reduction of job stress are just a few. However, the key point to this article is that it has been found that functional diversity is most beneficial on group performance through the increased external communication. This is due to every member of the group having diverse backgrounds and contacts with external networks of information. This then leads to a faster schedule, better budget performance and technical quality. Despite the issue of conflict arising in such a diverse group, it was found that cross-functional groups within the workforce are a major advantage.

The layout of this article is seen to be a success as it examines the idea of a cross-functional workgroup in the form of an experiment. This allows the topic of concern to be fully dissected and examined to reach an educated and informative conclusion. It is hard to find a weakness in this article as every aspect of the main issue is explored.

Why do employees resist teams?

The use of work teams throughout organizations has had a dramatic increase throughout the past few decades. This article examines the conflict and resistance that has accompanied this growth. It was found that the resistance was due to low tolerance for change and the lack of trust throughout the organization. Self-managing work teams where the group members manage themselves, take action on problems and assign jobs are addressed throughout the article. The effectiveness of this type of work group is measured in terms of productivity and member attitudes and behaviours. The issue of why these teams do not enhance organisational productivity and employee behaviour is examined throughout the article. It is found that organisational change in general is usually resisted throughout most organizations causing conflict and job dissatisfaction. Not only is this due to the pressure to alter the status quo but also because of the diversity that exists within the self-managed groups. It was found from these studies that the main issue of concern from employees surveyed about self-managed groups was the issue of fairness. This concern about change generally results in resistance leading to conflict within the workplace.

The article is successful in that it directly deals with the emotions and reactions of people in a workplace making the data more accurate and believable. It also manages to examine issues that have been untouched in previous research dealing with the same topic. The weakness of the article is that it involves minimal opinions from the other side of the argument and is therefore biased to a certain degree.

Effects of Intragroup Communication.

The idea of intragroup communication has previously been argued. This article however, conducts an experiment to find the advantages and disadvantages, if any, of the communication between people within an organisational group. Two tests were conducted to find the results of group members with no interaction and then again with a large involvement in the group work. The individuals belonging to the groups that are involved in the experiment, all have partially conflicting interests. This is obviously due to the diversity between existing members. The study examined repeated interactions in intragroup conflict. Two conditions existed to the study. One in which members of the group could interact freely, and one where interaction was prohibited. Results showed that individuals learnt that there was no benefit of contribution to group work when communication was prohibited. However, when group interaction was allowed, the individual contribution or participation doubled.

This study was successful in that it was able to define the relations between the individual group member’s interests and the collective interests of the group. Two modes of conflict resolution were able to be distinguished between and important information is gained from a study of high interest to organisational groups. However, it is partially vague in one area of what it believes to be correct. If it is healthy for different groups within the one organization to compete, it must be healthy for the individual members of a certain group to also compete. On the other hand, it is also thought that what is best for the group is not necessarily best for the individual group member. This range of ideas was not successfully concluded in the article.

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