Diversity and Their Impact on Leadership Effectiveness

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Diversity and their Impact on Leadership Effectiveness In an article from the Journal of Business & Psychology (2013), the authors (Woehr, Arciniega, & Poling, 2013) explored diversity from two opposite views; with the first one defined as the pessimistic perspective (Woehr et al.,2013) referring to social attraction theories that suggested that people with similar background would interact with each other better and as result, facilitate performance. As an opposite, there are anticipated conflicts in diverse teams that can cause poor performance because of poor interaction in result of not sharing the same values and ideals. The second view defined as the optimistic perspective (Woehr et al., 2013) refers to theories that embrace the benefits in diverse teams and explains that diverse teams provide unique alternatives in performance and creativity. However, it is later discussed that diverse teams resulted in lower team cohesion, lower efficacy, and more conflict. The leadership effectiveness is impacted with a necessity to monitor closely their team in order to recognize aspects of diversity that are not directly visible like psychological variables such as people values and ideals. According to Woehr et al. (2013), it would be beneficial to promote teambuilding sessions with the team members to analyze the combined value profiles of the teams; however, it is stated that this study has its own limitations as although reviewing many theories from previous studies made by different authors and applying a laboratory-based study on undergraduate students; the results may not fully represent the characteristics and priorities of non-student, organizational teams. My Experience In my opinion there is true to all the reviewed theories about diversity in teams, whether at work or other activities in most hypothesis, diversity presents pros and cons; and as suggested
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