Factors that moderate the effects of workplace diversity

Discuss about the Article Analysis of Mgt5obr Organisational Behaviour Assessment.

Diversity in organizations cuts across teams, rational demography, as well as organizational diversity to achieve innovation, decision making, and attraction of talented staff. Despite its importance, diversity at the workplace might fail to achieve expected benefits when there is increased conflict, lower morale among employees, and poor performance. This paper analyses three journal articles to understand their perspective about diversity. The first selected article is by Guillaume, et al (2017). The article examines a number of factors that moderates the effects of workplace diversity. The second article selected from the library is by Lai, Lam and Lam (2013). The authors use a team cultural perspective to understand behaviours among groups. The third article by Kalinoski, et al (2013) focuses on the idea of outcome of diversity training. The entire paper is divided into three major sections. The second section presents a summary of each of the three articles. The paper does this by identifying key concepts and main points like theoretical concepts. The third section analyses the three articles in terms of common and contrasting concepts. The last section provides 2 concise recommendations to managers on ways of dealing with diversified workplace.

The first article is by Guillaume, et al (2017) applies Categorization-Elaboration model to form the basis of a theoretical lens. The article presents a review of several variables that moderate the effects of workplace diversity to achieve well-being, positive performance, and social integration among employees.  Guillaume, et al focus on factors that managers and organizations can control such as individual differences, culture, leadership, human resource, unit design, as well as strategy. CEM considers diversity as differences that occur among individuals in terms of attributes. Furthermore, CEM maintain that diversity embraces intergroup bias that comes out of social interaction and information-elaboration processes. The inter-group bias involves favourable responses that arise from within the group than outside the group. While on the other hand, the information-elaboration refers to exchange, perspectives, discussions, and individual-level processes that make people to come together to exchange information.

The findings from the review show that strategies that target to achieve growth and support diversity, moderate organizational diversity to achieve higher performance.  Organizations design strategies that seek to promote value-in diversity and task relevant information. Consequently, it contributes towards better decision making and innovation among employees. However, any downsizing strategy would lead to undermining of performance in the manner in which it supports intergroup bias hence, limiting demographic differences. The second finding shows that cross-categorization limits intergroup bias and enhances social integration, well-being, as well as performance. Furthermore, the article found that work group diversity play a major role in achieving positive results. Any forms of demographic diversity whether organizational or individual facilitates innovation only when related to task-based knowledge. However, they found that the nature of the team or setting of an industry does not play any role in determining overall performance. Most importantly, they argue that when people from different cultures come together, they coordinate to eliminate cases of acting individually and personal behaviour.  An interesting finding from the study is that situations that are characterised by autonomy, serve the role of supporting clear roles, decision making, shared objectives, and facilitation of positive diversity effects. Furthermore, differences among individuals in terms of diversity beliefs, learning goal orientation, need for recognition, and openness, they enhance social integration through intergroup contact, information-elaboration.

Team cultural perspective on workplace diversity

The second article by Lai, Lam and Lam (2013) looks that the team cultural perspective in order to understand organizational citizen behaviour while working to achieve the set objectives. Culture that occur within groups and among different organizations, shape how employees perform their tasks in socially as psychologically environment. Culture comes out as an important form that influences the manner in which individual develop their attention, make decisions, and guide their behaviour as attitudes. It is from such an understanding that team culture comes out as being the sets of shared, internalised assumptions, beliefs, norms, and values that every member of a team develops to shape how one performs the task. They argue that no one can perform a task along without involving others within a social and psychological environment. A majority of employees must coordinate with one another in order to achieve positive performance at the workplace. The article illustrates that human resources managers could form teams where members come from diversified cultural backgrounds to help them develop an innovative product. Diversified groups enable members with different talents from varying functional areas to facilitate their innovativeness and creativity. Second, members of a team must also show a high level of mindful of the needs and requirements as well as the standards of other team members to work effectively.  The fact that no one can work in isolation, it is critical to understand that everyone in a team must work towards developing and strengthening cultural norms to stand a better chance of shaping behaviours of other members. More specifically, this should be so when they understand that their behaviours would contribute towards sustainability of the team. Third, article argues that different teams cannot develop similar culture but that they might end up developing different cultures that enhance effective operation. It is from such difference that makes team cultures to play important roles in shaping the social environment to achieve positive performance. Lai, et al (2013) was motivated to focus on culture as one aspect of diversity that shapes organizational behaviours towards in-roles as extra-role behaviour. The focus of the paper was therefore, to develop a better understanding of how team culture influences organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB).

Lai et al. (2013) formulated their theory by focusing on OCB that targets organizations (OCBO) and one that targets individuals (OCBI). They argue that the need to differentiate the two focus points is because of association of OCB with varying consequences, antecedents, behaviours, and correlates. Additionally, they note that differential impacts from OCBI and OCBO towards job performance might make managers opt for behaviours that increase performance at the work place. For instance, the social orientation of an individual whether it is self-motivated or socially motivated, it is imperative to develop a deeper understanding concerning the type of OCB employees are likely to perform.

The outcome of diversity training

Alai et al (2013) formulate four hypotheses. Two hypotheses relate to OCBO within collectivistic teams while two were related to OCB within individualistic teams. Collective teams are those whose members come from cultures of collectivism. In the first case for instance, they were of the view that positive relationship arising from OCBI and performance rating remain either stronger or weaker when teams work together as a collective culture than a less collectivistic teal culture.  While in the second case, they hypothesized that there occurs a positive relationship between OCB and performance rating in either a strong or weaker individualistic team cultures or less individualistic teal team cultures. Individualist team in this case, is considered as whose members come from individualistic cultures and exhibit individualistic norms or behaviours.  

The analysis of primary data collected from a multiple team of 403 employees working in customer service department and 81 employees working as supervisors, showed that teams that work from a highly collectivistic cultures tend to place much value towards peer support, work-place harmony, and interpersonal relationships. This explains that need for supervisors to create an interpersonal nature of OCBI behaviours when they want to shape good citizenship behaviours. On the one hand, analysis findings reveal that when people work together as a team, OCBI becomes important in contributing towards performance ratings. However, an engagement in OCBO failed to show any contribution to improvement in performance ratings. According to Alai, et al is that OCBO does not support group norms.

While on the other hand, the study findings real that OCBO is likely to enhance performance when teams work through individualistic culture. For instance, members from individualistic cultures when they come together to form individualistic teams, they tend to place more emphasis on how OCBO supports the role of a personal achievement, uniqueness, and independence. Hence, OCBO show stronger association with job performance ratings among employees that work through their individualistic teams.

The third article by Kalinoski, et al. (2013) uses a theory and advance research on three components- training, attitude, and diversity in order to examine the likely differential effect towards effective, cognitive, and skill-based results. The study used meta-analytical approach to understand the effects of differential diversity and training towards skills, cognitive and effective outcomes. Kalinoski, et al. (2013) hypothesized that diversity training creates greater opportunity for social interaction and hence, affective-based performance. Secondly, they argue that diversity training creates motivation among people to strengthen their personal differences and work as a team to achieve organizational objectives. The finding from content analysis shows that across all types of outcomes, diversity training had smaller impact. However it had greater impact towards cognitive and skill based outcome when related to affective-based outcomes. While on the other hand, moderators helped enhance the effect of diversity training on affective outcome. Therefore, the study concluded that managers in organisations could use diversity training when they want to achieve higher affective-based outcomes. Any such training programs must ensure they include diversity training.

Diversity at the Workplace

The analysis from the three journal articles present common points of understanding concerning diversity at the workplace. For example, article 1 and 2 agrees that diversity among employees helps in enhancing performance through decision making, creativity, information sharing, and motivation. However, the two articles seem to differ on the basis of the nature of teams and characteristics of tasks. On the one hand the case of the first article, Guillaume, et al. (2017) argues that team type and industry can only have an effective when tasks relate to knowledge and innovation. While on the other hand, the second article by Lai, et al (2013) maintain that teams whose individuals come from collectivism cultures, enhance performance rating by creating interpersonal relationships, peer support, and workplace harmony. While teams that come from individualistic cultures only emphasizes OCBO because of the need to achieve uniqueness, independence, and personal achievement. According to Guillaume, et al. (2017), diversity at the work place only works to strengthen the bias that could arise because of failure to share information, achieve social-integration, and well-being.

Diversity Training Programmes

Even though the third article by Kalinoski, et al. (2013) does not focus on ole of diversity at the work place, they maintain that human resource managers should incorporate diversity training programs in the normal practises. It is through doing this that will help teams achieve affective, cognitive, as well as skill-based positive results. The first article also supports these findings and explains that diversity training for teams can build on the principle of CEM when they want to achieve positive performance. Most importantly, HR practises helps create relational coordination capabilities to promote social integration and well-being among employees. It is apparent that the results from the three articles matter in such a way that they could be applied by human resource managers in their real work settings.

This paper recommends that managers and organizations include diversity trainings in their training and development programmes. Most importantly, the training must be geared at achieving social categorization and information-processing. In terms of social categorization, failure to include diversity training could cause disruption in formation of sub-groups such as out-group and in-group. While on the other hand, failure to consider information-processing in training could make teams fail to benefit from expertise and knowledge. Consequently, teams might end up forming intergroup biases. When implemented by human resources managers, they can shape attitudes among employees towards their co-workers who come from different cultural backgrounds.

The second recommendation focuses on the need for human resource managers to form diversified teams. Just as explained by Lai, et al. (2013), the nature of teams plays a critical role in determining performance ratings and OCBI. In specific, managers need to help form teams with employees from collectivist cultures and individualistic cultures to eliminate cases of intergroup bias and enhance demographically diverse work teams. Consequently, such a team can utilize innovation and information sharing to achieve higher performance.

Conclusion

The analyses of the three articles provide an insight concerning the role of diversity and diversity training initiatives. Most importantly, the three articles achieves a common understanding concerning factors that moderates workplace diversity, how a company could go ahead to utilize differences among employees, and cultural perspectives. I agree that that all the findings matter and those they could be applied in real work settings. Areas of application should include incorporating diversity training plans and ensuring that human resource managers determine the nature of teams to avoid cases of intergroup bias as well as homogenous team cultures.

References

Guillaume, Y., Dawson, J., & Otaye-Ebede, L. (2017) Harnessing demographic differences in organizations: What moderates the effects of workplace diversity? Journal of Organizational Behavior, 38(2), 276-303

Kalinoski, Z. T., Steele-Johnson, D., Peyton, E. J., Leas, K. A., Steinke, J., & Bowling, N. A. (2013). A meta-analytic evaluation of diversity training outcomes. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 34(8), 1076-1104.

Lai, M., Y., Lam, W., & Lam, S.K. (2013). Organizational citizenship behavior in work groups: A team cultural perspective. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 34(2), 1039-1056