Recently, I’ve read an article from Christine M. Riordan, who is a famous author once wrote a blog “Diversity is worthless without inclusivity”. This is such a good article which can be easily understood. It states that in today’s society, organizations are working hard to create diversity within their workforce.

Diversity can bring many benefits to an organization, such as greater customer satisfaction, better market position, successful decision-making and higher organizational outcomes. However, most of them haven’t realized that it is not sustainable to only have diversity without inclusivity in the working environment. This will result in a persistent bias and limit the pool potential of candidates for positions, important assignments and promotions. In addition, it may also create some conflicts between colleagues. As a result, although diversity can provide organizations with lots of advantages, it also can create some potential problems.

This article just reminds me of the things happen in my team. I used to think of the reasons why are we struggling so much with the team members, and now I find out the answer. The answer just lies in the term “diversity”. Research suggests that there are two types of diversity. Surface diversity and deep diversity. Surface diversity is that which you can see, things like race, gender or age. Typically the effects of this type of diversity wear off pretty quickly and allow a team to move through the forming and storming stages of group development effectively.  Deep diversity, however, occurs when individuals value work differently or have different attitudes about how to accomplish group goals. Sometimes, too much deep diversity may badly damage the group cohesiveness. This is because different team members have different attitudes towards the same assignment. Some people value less on the group project and they prefer to spend more time doing something else. Therefore, if the team members are not able to achieve the same consensus and mutual tolerance between each other, it may easily cause some conflicts within a team.

In conclusion, it is quite important for us to understand the different types of diversity in the group. As one the team members, it is our responsibility to acknowledging issues of deep diversity early on. This can not only improve the efficiency of a team, but also improves the group cohesiveness.

Sources:

Christine M. Riordan. (2014, June 5). Diversity Is Useless Without Inclusivity. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2014/06/diversity-is-useless-without-inclusivity

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According to Ruby Fung’s blog, she talks about the importance of trust within an organization. In her blog, she takes the building of Pixar as an example to show readers that although the design of the building was focused on collaborative creativity, trust was built through Pixar by encouraging employees to interact with one another on the daily. This is trust exactly made the ordinary and perfect Pixar building.

In my opinion, trust not only improves the work efficiency and performance of an organization, but also plays a significant role in leadership. According to Colin Powell, he said that “Trust is the essence of leadership.” It is undeniable that trust has a great impact on it. In today’s society, building trust is considered as an essential ability of a qualified leader in an organization. Only a leader has awareness and knowledge of the importance building interpersonal trust within work relationships, particular with his or her employees, he or she can be defined as a good leader. It makes me think of a person called Michael in a British drama “The office”. In this drama, Michael’s behaviour is exactly the opposite of this.

Michael is a regional manager of a branch who is obnoxious and socially inept in this drama. In the point view of organizational behaviour of chapter 11, Michael is very lack of leadership skills. As a manager, he is lack of referent power, which is defined as the ability of a leader to cultivate respect and admiration of his followers. Before that, I have never thought of the reasons why Michael is lack of leadership, but I understand the reasons now. According to the show, I found that Michael failed to build trust and respect with his employees. Instead, he always fails to keep promises, make negative comments on their performance and invade employees’ privacy as well. In addition, he regularly makes jokes aimed to his employees and hurts their feeling at the same time. As a result, this results in bad interpersonal relations between Michael and his employees and leads to a weak leadership in the company.

In conclusion, as a leader, it is crucial for him or her to increase the awareness of building trust within followers and develop behavioural skills for demonstrating trustworthiness within an organization.

Sources:

• Ruby Fung. (2017, February 2). Ruby Fung’s Blog | Just another COMM292 Blog. Retrieved from https://blogs.ubc.ca/rubyf/
• Taina Savolainen, Sari Häkkinen. (2011, March). Trusted to Lead: Trustworthiness and its Impact on Leadership | TIM Review. Retrieved from https://timreview.ca/article/429

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