Cognitive Diversity

Diversity will enhance life as it teaches you to live with different types of people and teaches you how to get along with different types of people. In a diverse community we learn to build relationships with different people and groups. Diversity can enhance our life as we can see how people who haven’t got what we have, have to live and how what we have, we should be proud of and appreciative.

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).

From my experiences , I have learned the importance of diversity in any situation. While serving at my church in Bayonne this passed summer, I was surrounded by various people with different personalities and working skills. I now know, that being surrounded by diversity will help me to better cope with my responsibilities in the real world. Being a biology or chemistry major, I am setting myself up to be in a field where working with people and teamwork is essential.

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.

Benefits of a high workplace diversity environment is it not being stuck to conformity in group thinking, or being narrow-minded with similar thoughts and having preference to only be around people who think like you do which is known as the “diversity paradox”. According to a quote stated from Friedrich Nietzsche, Hackett (2014) “The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently” (p. 415). Instead, it reiterates the importance of having a diverse workplace because it constructs better ideas, coming from different minds, and build upon each other through brainstorming. However, a poor workplace diversity can also adversely affect one’s motivation, which leads to overall job dissatisfaction and demotivation. When there is poor workplace diversity, you can see less communication barriers and cultural resistance, but it also makes it harder for individuals to get used to working with others that aren’t the same as them. This can become a form of adversity for businesses if their employees cannot develop a strong skill set to adapt with not only coworkers but also customers in the environment. Therefore, better communication and interaction skills are essential to promoting a business and making it successful.

Diversity within a team is beneficial as each person brings together their own unique views and ways of working. When managed effectively this can help bring together different ideas and build a strong team. By having a diverse team there is opportunity for views / ideas to be seen that could help make the business better. This is due to each person seeing the task/ result from a different light. By listening to all people you can gage a better understanding of the end result.

During my time enrolled in Psy 3325: Stereotypes, Prejudice Discrimination, taught by Dr. Tay Hack, we explored several topics concerning social differences. Using the textbook ‘ Understanding the Psychology of Diversity’ second Edition, I gained a deeper understanding of how the mind groups individuals together both consciously and unconsciously thus influencing the way we treat a person. In this course we covered racism, classism, homosexism, weightism, ageism, and the stigmas that come with these titles.

How diverse of a team do you manage?? The team is very well diverse, consisting of male and female, older and younger, well experienced and entry level, and from different backgrounds and cultures. The diversity is what helps the team be a strong effective department for both the employees and the employer. 6.

Diverse people tend to have more diverse thinking styles, backgrounds, viewpoints, and values tending to create a more effective unit.

I believe that "Diversity" plays important roles in our lives. Without diversity, we cannot widen our field of view. Diversity helps us to open up our eyes and our world. From reading the essay "How diversity makes us smarter", written by Katherine W Phillips, I learned that there are some negative effects brought up by the social diversity where dialog of inclusion is advanced, but mostly diversity is something that has positive effect in our society and even individual. I could also reflect and make connection with my experience of moving from non diverse community to diverse community.

The impact of diversity is a successful learning experience for companies, and is equally as important to a company as its mission statement because of the educational and work ethics of its employees. Awareness and knowledge of diversity in addition to the similarities that humans possess can build relationships between employees and employers. Diversity helps employees and employers to be well educated and informed as to what forms a person’s values, attitudes, and behaviors.

Diversity is important to companies because with a diverse environment people can benefit and learn from others' ideas. Other reasons for the importance of diversity to many organizations are the recognition of differences as prerequisites for high performance and continuous improvement, enhancing the effectiveness and creativity of the organization, and valuing conflicts as opportunities for more effective decision-making and problem solving. Diversity has a major impact on our behaviors in the work place.

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.

Being around people who are different from us makes us more creative, more diligent and harder-working.