Experts have a clear understanding of the potential advantages that diversity brings to teams and organizations.
APM acknowledges that diverse teams generally outperform homogeneous ones. This correlation is increasingly evident in the performance and financial outcomes of organizations.
Does this align with your personal experience?
In a previous section, you explored exceptional and high-performing teams. Based on your own observations, do you see a connection between diversity and performance? Do teams with greater diversity produce superior work? Additionally, what challenges arise when working in highly diverse teams?
We are genuinely interested in hearing about your experiences and thoughts regarding these questions in the discussion section.
Oluwamayowa Paul Ajibola
Cohort 8 Team 8
In my own opinion and line of thought i will say a diverse team will work better than a homogenous team because with a diverse team, it’s all business, fixing the task at hand, there is basically no opportunity for any extra curricular activity, there’s usually some laxity in homogenous teams.
Diverse teams tend to be more professional in their approach to tasks.
Diversity is crucial and beneficial as it most likely produces high performance, because diverse individuals in a team produce ideas and profer solutions from their unique perspective
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Tpet
August 7, 2023 at 1:39 pm
From my own experience, diversity enhances the opportunity for a team member to harness the in-depth knowledge that might be hidden over-time.
However, working in highly diverse teams can also present challenges. Communication barriers, misunderstandings, and conflicts due to different cultural backgrounds or communication styles may arise. Additionally, forming a cohesive and inclusive team culture can be difficult, and unconscious biases may affect team dynamics. To leverage the benefits of diversity, teams must actively address these challenges and foster an inclusive environment that values and respects each
From my own experience, diversity enhances the opportunity for a team member to harness the in-depth knowledge that might be hidden over-time.
However, working in highly diverse teams can also present challenges. Communication barriers, misunderstandings, and conflicts due to different cultural backgrounds or communication styles may arise. Additionally, forming a cohesive and inclusive team culture can be difficult, and unconscious biases may affect team dynamics. To leverage the benefits of diversity, teams must actively address these challenges and foster an inclusive environment that values and respects each member’s contributions.
Diversity in a team can improve the overall productivity/performance of the team as long as the organization has a culture of participative leadership where everyone is allow to say their views or opinion and their opinion is valued. This culture allows everyone to make their own contributions without anyone being looked down upon. The best idea can be chosen out of other ideas. It is also important that the charter is accepted by everyone, once everyone accepts it , it’s easier to get the job done as everyone is working towards achieving one agreed/ set goal . Experts in the field keeps coaching the amateur to make sure they accomplish their task within the time frame. More diverse teams do better work and deliver better results and make better decision. It aids employee retention, increases profitability and business growth. It leads to greater innovative and solves problem faster.
– The challenges in diverse teams includes;-
Discrimination, misunderstanding due to differences in culture and ability to acknowledge , understand and integrate perspective.
Diversity increases performance. A more productive workforce translates to higher profit. Diverse team tend to be more innovative and creative in problem solving which puts one team ahead of competitors. Team members from different background brings a variety of skills, ideas, experience and perspective which translates into giving innovation for problem solving and gives corresponding valid sets of skills and tools to mitigate against unpredictable varied challenges in PM
In my experience, there’s a connection between diversity and performance.. This is because people comes together from different angles of life and knowledge, with varied skills,ideas, innovation and technical know how to improve or achieve the project goals and objectives… This leads to better productivity and also speedy up delivery process,hence meeting up with deadlines
Diversity has some challenges which may leads to the following if not properly managed.
1) Communication and collaboration problem.
2) Uncertainty of authority.
3) Competition.
From my experience, diversity in a team can improve the overall productivity/performance of the team as long as the organization has a culture of participative leadership where everyone is allow to say their views or opinion and their opinion is valued. This culture allows everyone to make their own contributions without anyone being looked down upon. The best idea can be chosen out of other ideas. It is also important that the charter is accepted by everyone, once everyone accepts it , it’s easier to get the job done as everyone is working towards achieving one agreed/ set goal . Experts in the field keeps coaching the amateur to make sure they accomplish their task within the time frame.
Disadvantage: It takes time for people in this kind of team to agree on one thing.
There will always be conflict in such environment. It’s left for the managements to manage the conflict well.
Diversity helps team to want to learn and stick together (integrate) to achieve common goal knowing fully well that their strength lies in togetherness and upholding the ethics as well as professionalism. They also learn from one another while bringing their best of expertise to the project.
I have worked in a diverse team on a few projects and it was hard at the beginning because we had to understand how best to communicate. Few days into the project, we were able to properly integrate and learn how best to communicate as well as work together. The project was a success because we were all on top of our game and performance was top-notch.
Diversity, when combined with the right expertise, has the potential to enhance a team’s likelihood of achieving its goals. However, in my view, based on personal experiences collaborating within various teams, I find that a stronger sense of bonding within the team leads to better overall performance. This is because while diverse expertise may work well during emergencies, it lacks the social cohesion and camaraderie needed to address conflicts arising from that very diversity.
To summarize, depending on the nature of the project, both types of teams can accomplish their tasks effectively, and neither is inherently superior to the other