Did the paper break down impact to team performance by diversity “bucket”? Munging differences in gender and race together with differences in functional background, educational background and experience seems like an odd choice to me:
“Demographic diversity would include age, gender, ethnicity, religion, functional background, educational background, organisational tenure, and experience. “
I ask, in part, because one of the most successful teams I ever led had high levels of diversity wrt race and gender. Educational background and experience, on the other hand, were pretty comparable across most of the team. That's obviously one fairly subjective data point, but it's enough to make me skeptical of the report's approach here.
Good points. The 'munging together' of aspects of diversity is probably a simplification in my summary rather than the report itself which does break it down further.
Like you, my experience has pointed to the value of diverse teams over homogenous teams - not only from a practical performance standpoint but also an ethical one.
This is their summary finding:
Finding 1: The link between team effectiveness and team diversity dimensions such as
I’d be interested to see what the correlation is of performance to organisation ethos. Personally, I would find it quite challenging to get excited and committed to a large pharma company given their public standing.
Unfashionable though it is, beauty as an organisational parameter matters. I often cycle back to Alan Moore’s work in “Do Build” to consider where the energy of a project might lie.
It is difficult to get motivated by making money for others at the expense of the health of our soul….
In Software Engineering there has been quite a lot of research into to correlation between organisational ethos and performance. Nicole Fosgren and others showed Ron Westrum's Culture Typologies as predictive of organisational performance: https://itrevolution.com/articles/westrums-organizational-model-in-tech-orgs/
'Yes' to beauty - in what we build and how we build - good engineering has both form and function, but we often disregard form in favour of function.
Great summary of the teams REA👍. As complexity science and human system dynamics start to embed themselves into mainstream management training, seeing knowledge at a team system level, that is greater or lesser then its sum of its parts is critical.
For those in HR & learning, moving beyond the idea of the brain as an information processor and understanding how learning in development happens in an embodied mind, embedded in an environment , enacted through others and extended by areas such as AI.
Did the paper break down impact to team performance by diversity “bucket”? Munging differences in gender and race together with differences in functional background, educational background and experience seems like an odd choice to me:
“Demographic diversity would include age, gender, ethnicity, religion, functional background, educational background, organisational tenure, and experience. “
I ask, in part, because one of the most successful teams I ever led had high levels of diversity wrt race and gender. Educational background and experience, on the other hand, were pretty comparable across most of the team. That's obviously one fairly subjective data point, but it's enough to make me skeptical of the report's approach here.
Good points. The 'munging together' of aspects of diversity is probably a simplification in my summary rather than the report itself which does break it down further.
Searching for 'diversity' in the scientific paper brings up their references and more granular analysis (https://www.cipd.org/globalassets/media/knowledge/knowledge-hub/evidence-reviews/2023-pdfs/8388-high-performing-teams-scientific-summary-may23.pdf)
Like you, my experience has pointed to the value of diverse teams over homogenous teams - not only from a practical performance standpoint but also an ethical one.
This is their summary finding:
Finding 1: The link between team effectiveness and team diversity dimensions such as
age, gender, ethnicity, religion, functional background, educational background,
organisational tenure and experience is small and sometimes negative (Level AA)
It is often assumed that team effectiveness can be enhanced by differences between
individual members on dimensions such as age, functional background, organisational
tenure, gender, race, ethnicity and experience. As such, diversity is one of the most
researched attributes of effective teams. This review identified eight meta-analyses,
representing a combined sample size of more than 2,000 teams, that measured the
correlations between these attributes and team effectiveness or team efficiency (Bell et
al, 2011; Bui et al, 2019; Guillaume et al, 2012; Haas, 2010; Horwitz and Horwitz, 2007;
Wang et al, 2019; Webber and Donahue, 2001; Zhou and Rosini, 2015). Surprisingly, all
meta-analyses demonstrated only small (< .1), zero, or even negative associations,
regardless of team size, team type or task type. It is therefore important to consider – and
compensate for – potential negative consequences of team diversity
Thanks, John. I think I need to wade through that big table in Appendix 3.
I’d be interested to see what the correlation is of performance to organisation ethos. Personally, I would find it quite challenging to get excited and committed to a large pharma company given their public standing.
Unfashionable though it is, beauty as an organisational parameter matters. I often cycle back to Alan Moore’s work in “Do Build” to consider where the energy of a project might lie.
It is difficult to get motivated by making money for others at the expense of the health of our soul….
In Software Engineering there has been quite a lot of research into to correlation between organisational ethos and performance. Nicole Fosgren and others showed Ron Westrum's Culture Typologies as predictive of organisational performance: https://itrevolution.com/articles/westrums-organizational-model-in-tech-orgs/
'Yes' to beauty - in what we build and how we build - good engineering has both form and function, but we often disregard form in favour of function.
Great summary of the teams REA👍. As complexity science and human system dynamics start to embed themselves into mainstream management training, seeing knowledge at a team system level, that is greater or lesser then its sum of its parts is critical.
For those in HR & learning, moving beyond the idea of the brain as an information processor and understanding how learning in development happens in an embodied mind, embedded in an environment , enacted through others and extended by areas such as AI.