The Effects of Diversity on Small Work Group Processes and Performance

Diversity is an increasingly important factor inorganizational life as organizations worldwide becomemore diverse in terms of the gender, race, ethnicity,age, national origin, and other personal characteristics of their members. The exact impact ofwithin-group diversity on small group processes andperformance is unclear. Sometimes the effect ofdiversity seems positive, at other times negative, andin other situations, there seems to be no effect at all.In this article, we suggest that these types of findingsmight be explained by using agroup-development model to examine theimpact of diversity on group processes and performance. Our modeluses concepts from Jackson et al.'s (1995), Milliken andMartins' (1996), and other models, as well as our ownconcepts, to show how diversity affects group development and performance. Among the conceptsincluded in the model are readily detectable personalattributes, underlying personal attributes, cognitiveparadigm dissimilarity, cognitive costs and rewards, diversity management skills, group behavioralintegration, and cognitive performance resources. In thepages that follow, we will explain each of thecomponents of the model and suggest specific hypotheses generated from the model.     

A Conceptual Framework for Assessing Organization, Work Group, and Individual Effectiveness During and After Downsizing

The need for a unified, cross-level(organization, work group, individual employee) model oforganizational downsizing has been suggested by severalauthors (e.g., Kozlowski et al., 1993). The definition of downsizing, in terms applicable only at theorganization level, prevents researchers from developinga more cohesive view of the interactive impact ofdownsizing for the organization, work groups, and individuals. In this paper, we definedownsizing more broadly as a constellation of stressorevents centering around pressures toward work forcereductions which place demands upon the organization,work groups, and individual employees, and requirea process of coping and adaptation. This stress-basedview of downsizing allows researchers to developconcepts to guide research on downsizing that are more broadly applicable across levels of analysis.To show the advantages of this stress-based view ofdownsizing, this paper uses concepts from the stresscoping literature to identify a set of criticaldependent variables that should be studied in downsizingresearch. We argue that these variables are applicablefor organization, group, and individual employee-levelresearch.