Gender and Culture Diversity Occurring in Sell-Formed Work Groups

Abstract

Much attention is being paid to the topic of diversity in the workplace, as academicians and managers confront the issues emerging from an increasingly diverse American workforce (Thomas and Ely, 1996; Fagenson, 1993). The impact of increased workforce diversity touches virtually all management concerns. As a result, the diversity literature includes a large number of areas of inquiry including, though not limited to, the impact of diversity on communication-oriented outcomes, on cognitive outcomes like creativity of solutions, and on affective reactions like commitment or satisfaction (including turnover and job performance) (Milliken and Martins, 1996). Broadly considered, the literature falls into two categories: the impact of the organization on diverse groups and the impact of diverse groups on the organization. Research within the former category focuses on the difficulty that organizations have in providing fair treatment to diverse groups with differing needs and on the challenges of managing heterogeneous groups. Reasons for difficulty in integrating workers range from social constraints that preclude integration and acceptance of women and minorities into the workgroup (Fagenson, 1993; Tsui et al., 1992) to the conflict faced by managers when weighing diversity objectives against resource constraints (Barry and Bateman, 1996). The majority of this writing paints a negative portrait of the organization's attempt to handle diversity within its ranks. The latter category (i.e., the impact of diverse groups on the organization) largely argues for the potential benefits that are posited to derive from diversity in organizations. Many authors have suggested that ethnic and gender diversity can provide organizational benefits ranging from competitive advantages such as marketing strength and the ability to attract human resources at the strategic level (Cox and Blake, 1991) to improved creativity in group decision making (Nemeth, 1986) and improved task performance (Shaw, 1983). However, studies also indicate that gender and culture diversity create barriers to effective interactions that hinder performance. The net result is that research suggests that, without benefit of effective intervention, there should be as little diversity as possible in decision-making groups (Maznevski, 1994), although, over time, higher levels of diversity may contribute to improved decision making (Watson et al., 1991). An important but ignored topic of study in the research on group diversity is the basis for work group formation. Many organizational groups, such as functional departments, may be experiencing greater gender and culture diversity as the increasing diversity of the workforce brings a more diverse set of workers to organizations. However, the inflow of diverse workers does not necessarily mean that all organizational groups will assemble in a diverse way. With regard to this issue, Blau's (1977) discussion of group heterogeneity and social structure may be instructive. On the one hand, Blau asserts that similarities on one nominal parameter (e.g., race) will promote social associations. On the other hand, he maintains that people will associate not only with members of their own groups but also with members of other groups. Of these two competing propositions, it appears that the one emphasizing homogeneity has primacy in the formation of many groups. Research on both similarity-attraction theory (Byrne, 1971) and self-categorization theory (Tajfel and Turner, 1986) suggests that people are likely to be attracted more to those who are similar on demographic characteristics such as race, age, and gender. Kandel's (1978) study of the friendships of 2,000 high school students, for example, found that demographic characteristics of race and gender were the primary correlates of interpersonal attraction in dyads. Work by Osbeck et al. (1997) also supported the similarity-attraction hypothesis, showing a particularly strong relationship for minority groups. …