How Smart Managers Make Diversity Work

Leaders need more variety in their work teams. Here’s how to design — or fix — diverse teams for maximum productivity.

Diversity is often heralded as the key to building a successful work team. But David Harrison, professor of Management at Texas McCombs, points out that the real question should be: Does the team have variety, separation, or disparity? All three can make a team appear diverse, but only one leads to creativity and innovation.

“Variety is the hero of diversity,” he says. “It’s hard to think of a team where you want everybody to think exactly the same way or have exactly the same information at their disposal. Because if they did, why would we need to have a team?”

Variety, he explains, leads to what researchers call higher information processing capacity. In others words, when a team has more variety, it has a greater range of talent, experiences, and perspectives. Those members “see more alternatives, they vet those alternatives more often, and they’re more flexible.” Which is why, he adds, that for most of the tasks a team performs, it’s better to have more variety among employees.

But what happens when, instead, a team has a high degree of separation or disparity? On the surface, it can look like that team is diverse — but in actuality, it is lopsided in terms of power, wages, or influence. Under those circumstances, Harrison says, no one wants to share information, which is critical to a group’s success. People often feel resentful, work ethic and output decline, and the team can implode. Separation and disparity, he adds, are the villains of diversity, and it’s up to managers to ensure they’re not creating teams that are destined to fail.

How should managers design teams to ensure variety? What happens if a manager inherits a dysfunctional team with separation or disparity? To learn more, watch the video from David Harrison’s presentation as part of the Texas Enterprise Speaker Series.