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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