Adedeji Awolesi

Awolesi Adedeji Israel

Diversity has been an evolving concept. The term is both specific, focused on an individual, and contextual, defined through societal constructs (Moore, 1999). Researchers have categorised diversity into four major areas: Internal (e.g., ethnicity, race, IQ, gender, sexual orientation), External (e.g., religion, parental status, nationality, culture or marital), Organisational (e.g., department, union, position) and Personal (e.g., skills, ability and traits (Simmons-Welburn, 1999) and Ibarra and Hansen (2011), have argued that the ability to bring people together from different cultures, disciplines and background and being able to bring out the best in them is a must for leaders.

Diversity is about empowering people. It makes a team effective by making the most of the strengths of each team members. For an organisation to obtain competitive advantage, they need to grow workforce from group into teams that use full potential of every individual.  Embracing diversity is the first step of forming a team. To have an effective team, there must be a diverse group of people on the team, which is, the team must consist of collection of individual experiences, backgrounds, and cultures that can view problems and challenges from a wide-variety of lenses which affects the high productivity rate of the team.

 Results have shown that diversity is teams yield greater productivity and it is a key component in effective people management (SHRM, 1998). Diversity in teams brings out positivity in team outputs; the workforce synergy brings out creativity which bonds the team work. Team member’s suggestions are based on the richness of their perspectives and this will provide more opportunities for creative ideas. Discussions are made wholly while decisions are concrete, sounder and there are lots of innovations from a diverse team. Jeffrey (2008) argues that diverse teams are prone to dysfunction because the very differences that feed creativity and high performance can also create communication barriers. Team members often hide their weaknesses, never disclose their true self-assessments, threatened when challenged by their expertise, and often act defensively in the face of such challenges. Same time they are very quick to form biased impressions of others, often based on thinking and background thoughts.

Tuckman model explains how leaders can get their teams to work effectively well. It identifies the five main stages of team formation which are the forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning stages. The forming stage explains the formation of the team, its purpose and individual responsibilities. Storming stage allows interaction between team members and how they accept individual views. The norming stage explains how guidelines and standards can be introduced to the team for control. Performing stage is when all team members work effectively together based on the earlier three stages and the adjourning stage deals with the disbandment of the team when purpose is being fulfilled or some members might just find it deem of leaving the team (Mullins and Christy, 2013).

For a leader to make the best use of diversity in a team to the advantage of the team, the leader needs to create culture of honour and respect for differences in members, respect for each other and deepen the understanding of team members to grow personally and professionally. Gugin research based on survey they had on challenges managers face in diverse teams, they argue that Managers need to understanding why people behave differently than expected, avoid getting frustrated and angry, needs to motivate cultural diverse teams, achieve desired level of efficiency and managers need proper training on managing a cultural diverse team (Gugin, 2012).

Organisation believes diversity in team help better evaluate organizational ideas from different perspectives (Cox, 1993; Konrad, 2003).  Examples, Chevron (2012) uses its networking communication patterns to improve mentoring, Ford Motor Company (2008) uses its employee resource groups to suggest better ways to serve minority customers and Bank of America uses its diversity innovative to increase Latino customer base to serve their Hispanic customers (Bank of America, 2008).

A leader also needs to have cognitive, technical and interpersonal skills because this will be needed to communicate ideas, views, aims, objective and plans to team members in the oil and gas industry most especially in the upstream sector for him to successful and be efficient (Yukl, 2010).

In conclusion, it can be noted that diversity in teams can improve the performance of the team which will yield positive effect on the organisational productivity. With organisations tending towards this direction, managers need to be equipped with adequate training of managing diverse team and the need to influence and guide the team at all stages of team development (tuckman model) to bring out the best in teams to bring about a sustainable global labour workforce.

References

Bank of America. (2008). Community development – National Council of La Raza. http://www.bankofamerica.com/community/index.cfm?template=cdb_laraza

Chevron. 2012. Diversity | Approach | Corporate Responsibility | Chevron. [online] Available at: http://www.chevron.com/corporateresponsibility/approach/diversity/ [Accessed: 3 Sep 2013].

Cox, T. (1993). Cultural diversity in organizations: Theory, research, and practice. San Francisco: Barrett-Koehler

Ford Motor Company. (2008). Diversity at Ford. http://www.ford.com/ourvalues/diversity/diversity-ford/

Gugin. 2012. The top 5 challenges managers of cultural diverse teams are facing – Gugin. [online] Available at: http://gugin.com/the-top-5-challenges-managers-of-cultural-diverse-teams-are-facing/ [Accessed: 3 Sep 2013].

Ibarra, H, & Hansen, M (2011), ‘Are You a Collaborative Leader?’ Harvard Business Review [online], 89, 7/8, pp. 68-74

Jeffrey T. 2008. Making Diverse Teams Click. [online] Available at: http://hbr.org/2008/07/making-diverse-teams-click/ar/1 [Accessed: 3 Sep 2013].

Konrad, A. M. (2003). Defining the domain of workplace diversity scholarship. Group and Organization Management, 28, 4-17.

Moore, S. (1999). Understanding and managing diversity among groups at work: Key issues for organizational training and development. Journal of European Industrial Training, 23, 208–217.

Mullins, L. and Christy, G. 2013. Management et organisational behaviour. Harlow: Pearson.

Simmons-Welburn J. (1999). Diversity dialogue groups: A model for enhancing work place diversity. Journal of Library Administration, 27, 111-121.

Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). (1998). SHRM survey explores the best in diversity practices. Fortune 500 firms outpace the competition with greater commitment to diversity. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). Available on the World Wide Web at http://www.shrm.org/press/releases/980803.htm.

Yukl, G. (2010) Leadership in Organizations. 7th edn. London: Pearson Prentice Hall.