Adaptation-Innovation Theory

Diversity is a wonderful asset to an organization and brings with it many benefits. Employees bring in their own personal experiences and knowledge to the team (Burns & Kerby, 2012). Having diverse teams allows for the possibility to fix a problem or perfect a process by using different employee’s experiences and past knowledge to find solutions. A diverse workforce can drive economic growth and capture a greater share of the consumer market (Burns & Kerby, 2012). With diversity as a core value, the recruitment pool is widened to find the most qualified candidate and reduces employee turnover as a result. An organization can be highly competitive with a diversity initiative by adapting to a changing environment (Burns & Kerby, 2012).

This in turn can increase the creativity and innovation within organizations. As well, individuals from diverse backgrounds are able to provide companies with insight into foreign business practices, translation assistance, and offer detailed information to assist in market penetration. A diverse working team can also improve decision making by providing different perspectives on problems. Individuals embrace working alongside other cultures, as it is a personal learning process that will prove useful in the future.

The positive impact of cultural diversity on group behavior can contribute creativity to a high-performance team. Membership diversity offers a rich pool of information, talent, and varied perspectives that can help improve team problem solving and increase creativity (Hunt, J., Osborn, R., Schermerhorn, J., 2005). Cultural diversity contributes various group input and group dynamics to the team. These two factors are essential in the high performance of a team. Cultural diversity can develop a high-performance team by allowing the diverse potentials of a team to operate. The negative impact of cultural diversity on group behavior can develop numerous of conflicts between team members. Conflicting interaction can limit or decrease the effectiveness and efficiency of productivity. There should be an awareness of the diverse culture values in order to prevent these conflicts.

Managing Diversity in the workplace is more than just an acquired skill, it is "a way of thinking" (1). It involves creating an environment that allows all employees to contribute to organizational goals and experience personal growth. The key is to help employees reach their full potential by creating an environment that will allow them to be motivated and productive and ultimately, be beneficial for the organization.

Deep-level diversity promotes team performance by giving opportunities for authentic interaction with different personalities, learning styles and character traits that would provide opportunities for optimal team performance. To begin, a definition of surface level diversity is helpful; surface-level diversity is a dynamic that people are keenly aware of in our society. We are taught at an early age to “play” well with others regardless of traits that are highly visible to us and those around us, such as race, gender, and age (Phillip and Gulley, 2014). Hubbard (2004) uses the term “workforce diversity” as another identifier for surface-level diversity to include the following aspects: “gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual

A little more than half of the team has primary strengths characterized as thinkers with an even mix of theoretical and practical thinking. The rest have strengths that lean toward risking or doing. There is also an even mix of the independent and collaborative decision making.

One of the objectives that the team discussed was diversity in the workplace. Major corporations have encountered issues concerning diversity in the work place. Our team can directly relate to this subject in the workplace since all of us are diverse minorities in our individual work place. It was discussed in the group that diversity in the workplace is the manager’s responsibility to insure that the workplace is a diverse environment. Managers in most companies are required to hire a diverse staff. Managers have the ability to use race, religion, and tenure as qualities to inspire success and

In the presentation on Lakota Medicine Wheel, I learned that diversity in the group or in the workplace is a key goal to work effectively. I agree that diverse group would accomplish more that a group with one or two skills and styles. All the characteristic of gifts should be balanced and joined together on the daily basis so the group on the project as well as the whole company will benefit and work on the highest level of productivity. And also heaving people in the group with all skills and styles is very important because this will help the group and the project to be accomplished at its best and on a higher level.

There are two threats to team effectiveness. First, the Asch effect, when an individual’s judgement is distorted by an incorrect but unanimous opposition, and second, group think, when a cohesive in-group members choose unanimity over appraisal of alternative courses of action (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2013, pp. 290, 292). Diversity is important to mitigate the Asch effect and group think.

Every person’s opinions and skills are valuable. It is important to be well-rounded and understand an individual’s views on particular topics. By being considerate of other’s feelings, there will be less conflicts. So far in my BA 105W group, we each have our own ideas and input when we work together. The vibe within our groups makes it easy to throw our ideas out there knowing that the others will add more to the ideas instead of attack each other. Like any other teams, there are times when we cannot come to a conclusion and would have to reason why we believe this idea is better than the others. Also, diversity within a group is very important. Groups and teams that consist of diversity are more successful because of different backgrounds

Diversity is what makes people different, not just culturally but in human differences. Having a multitude of differences in the workforce gives an organization the ability to use many ideas to reach a common goal. A person could say that a diverse group of people together in one room can accomplish greater achievements than a room filled with the same types of individuals. Managers understand the concept of diversity, and how important diversity is to the success of a company’s ability to implement programs that continue to develop a harmonious and diverse workplace. The recognition that diversity is a reality in the workforce has generated an enormous amount of activity over the years among leaders in business, government, and civil

The drawbacks of the cultural diversity lead us to the ineffectiveness in communication or miscommunication or even a conflict among all the group members. The diversity in a group affects proper interaction among the group members, which ultimately affects the performance of all individuals in the group. In addition to this, diversity is also effective as individuals from different culture to have different views, which can contribute in increasing the efficiency of the task (Leonard, Graham & Bonacum, 2004). Additionally, for me, the most challenging part of being assigned in a group was working and communicating effectively with my group in a clear and assertive way. My group was the first to present the presentation, so we had to focus on the proper management of time to complete the task. Ellis (2012) says that delegation can offer significant time savings when accomplishing group tasks and this is something we should have considered more as we often did not take into account the particular strengths or weaknesses of the individuals in our

Diversity in culture and demographic characteristics can be a negative impact or be one of the team's greatest strengths, depending on how the team as a whole functions and applies these different “routes to success”. A group can become a high performing team by understanding how cultural and demographic differences influence group behavior. The groups must realize that they can benefit from their diversity to their advantage and into a high performance team.

Research by Charlene J. Nemeth found that minority views can stimulate consideration of non-obvious alternatives in task groups. Nemeth found that the "minority" groups adopted multiple strategies and identified more solutions than the "majority" groups. She concluded that the groups exposed to minority views were more creative than the more homogeneous, majority groups. She further concluded that persistent exposure to minority viewpoints stimulates creative thought processes. Another experiment compared the creativity of teams that were homogeneous on a series of attitude measures against teams with heterogeneous attitudes. Problem solution creativity was judged on originality and practicality. Results indicated that as long as the team members had similar ability levels, the heterogeneous teams were more creative than the homogeneous ones. If

Today’s workforce is forever changing and more importance is put on the managing of a diverse work group. Thinking of it as each person in a spur on a gear and each person is different by the above definition. The gears most align and blend to make the organization move forward, (Schermerhorn, 2003, P. 1).