Improving Team Performance

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).

The way in which an organization tackles diversity determines its negative or positive outcome. All the 5 companies agreed that diversity has contributed to their success. Some barriers were identified in managing diversity like the difficulties faced by women in managing the work and family, fear of discrimination, resistance to change, diversity is not seen as an organizational priority, resistance to change and unsupportive working environment for diverse employees. Diversity contributes to more productivity but if not properly managed could hinder success.

Team Cohesion in the sport setting is the most important factor for group effectiveness, being influenced largely by leadership people. Homogenous attitudes and goals, personal sacrifice, and training and instructing coaching tactics are positively linked to team cohesion, and therefore performance. Cohesion is a dynamic and multidimensial process, and these methods could change depending on initial levels. By examining two scenarios of teams having significantly different levels of cohesion, it can be determined how these tactics are used in contrasting contexts. It was concluded the same tactics were used regardless of initial team cohesiveness, and performance was improved in both cases. A single coach administered these methods, but a case study revealed that multiple team leaders can change the different factors enhancing cohesion and still gets the same performance enhancements. Thus, cohesion does not have to rely on a single leader but multiple figures can have a combined effect.

With the data from the Leading With Intent survey it is difficult to refute the diversity gap, but why does it matter? There is a positive correlation between diverse workplaces and employee engagement; increased productivity, company morale, and higher retention rates. When employees are engaged they are more likely to feel personally invested in the success of the organization. There is also evidence that diverse groups arrive at more creative solutions than

A team is a type of organizational group with independent members. They share common goals and work together to meet these goals (Northouse, 2016). The organization where I work has teams at various levels for maximizing the success. These teams include, core teams, coordinating teams, patient aligned care team (PACT), contingency teams, ancillary teams, support and administration teams (Veterans Health Administration [VHA], 2015). Some of these teams have interdepartmental members while others have intradepartmental staff. Successful teams have a concrete blueprint and that contributes to their effective functioning. There are several factors that affect these teams irrespective of the level. The factors comprise the presence of a clear task, separation from non-team members, authority, and stability. The factors like working conditions, team process and bridging the gaps are concerns for the executive level. The complexity of the task, individual skills and their diverse specializations affect the selection of the team members. The team’s meaningful interactions decide their success. Independent teams can help promote friendly competition within the organization and lead to better staff performance. An efficient leader can design and launch an effective team through careful planning and selection of the right members. He/she keeps the factors that affect the success of the team in mind when designing the teams. The patient care units

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

1. Describe in depth the characteristics that enable a high-performance team to excel at teamwork.

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

America's past should teach America's today that success lies within diversity. In order to achieve ultimate success, diversity is a necessity. Workforce diversity is a fact of organizational life. It is also a key concern for theory and practice in organizational behavior ( van-Knippenberg, De-Dreu, Homan, 2004).

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.

Most people assume that workplace diversity is about increasing racial, national, gender, or class representation -- in other words, recruiting and retaining more people from traditionally underrepresented "identity groups." Taking this commonly held assumption as a starting point, we set out six years ago to investigate its link to organizational effectiveness. We soon found that thinking of diversity simply in terms of identity-group representation inhibited effectiveness. Organizations usually take one of two paths in managing diversity. In the name of equality and fairness, they encourage (and expect) women and people of color to blend in. Or they set them apart in jobs that relate specifically to their backgrounds, assigning them, for example, to areas that require them to interface with clients or customers of the same identity group. African American M.B.A. 's often find themselves marketing products to innercity communities; Hispanics frequently market to Hispanics or work for Latin American subsidiaries. In those kinds of cases, companies are operating on the assumption that the main virtue identity groups have to offer is a knowledge of their own people. This assumption is limited -- and limiting -- and detrimental to diversity efforts. What we suggest here is that diversity goes beyond increasing the number of different identity-group affiliations on the payroll to recognizing that such an effort is merely the first step in managing a diverse workforce for the

Large data-set studies have an obvious limitation: they only show that diversity is correlated with better performance, not that it causes better performance. Research on racial diversity in small groups, however, makes it possible to draw some causal conclusions. Again, the findings are clear: for groups that value innovation and new ideas, diversity helps.

From our research, we identified three different perspectives on workforce diversity that people embrace, each with different implications for a work group’s ability to realize the benefits of its cultural diversity. We use these observations here to examine critically some of the themes and basic assumptions of previous research and to propose new directions for both researchers and practitioners interested in diversity (Ely &Thomas, 2001). When organizations have a diverse economy, it makes the company strong. Once our nation has embrace the changes from the demographics that reap the economic benefits of a diverse and inclusive workforce. Burns et al. (2012) stated in their investigation that:

Organizations have been becoming increasingly diverse in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality. This diversity brings substantial potential benefits such as better decision making, greater creativity and innovation, and more successful marketing to different types of customers. But, increasing cultural differences within a workforce also bring potential costs in higher turnovers, interpersonal conflicts, and communicational breakdowns. The utilities of diversity training and the essential managerial skills required for effectively managing diversity will also be discussed.

Diversity in workforce “include, but are not limited to: age, ethnicity, ancestry, gender, physical abilities/qualities, race, sexual orientation, educational background, geographic location, income, marital status, military experience, religious beliefs, parental status, and work experience”(Thomas 1992). Diversity in the workforce is initially perceived as a response toward the increasing diversity of the consumers in the market (Agocs & Burr, 1996). From there, it has been observed that capitalizing on existing differences among the employees provide benefits to the organization. Diversity in workforce fosters and encourages