DIVERSE TEAM PRODUCE BETTER RESULTS

Theme 1 Research has consistently shown that diverse teams produce better results, provided they are well led. The ability to bring together people from different backgrounds, disciplines, cultures, and generations and leverage all they have to offer, therefore, is a must-have for leaders (Ibarra and Hansen 2011: 71).

The purpose of this blog is to help understand whether diverse teams can help building an organisation better. Some theories are put forth followed by examples of a few organisations. The learnings from which would help solve the debate better.
Agcos and Burr (1996) point out that a culturally diverse workforce is a response to global changes around the world with people immigrating to different places and countries. They conclude that this phenomenon has got companies around to world to discuss about diverse workforce. Salmon & Schork (2003) further infers that organizations are seeking to make use of the potentiality available within a diverse workforce in order to succeed in a diverse world. Lles (1995) points out that a diverse workforce may help in understanding the diversity in customer’s preferences, with different employees coming from different backgrounds can appeal to the customers coming from their similar backgrounds leading to a better customer relationship because of the different tune in varying customer base (Marvin and Girling, 2000). The following organisations can be seen to see how diverse teams might be advantageous or disadvantageous to an organisation.
Hospital
A hospital is an organization that is very critical to the society that we live in and is a place where people from all walks of life come for treatment, irrelevant of who is managing the clinic. Diversity in a hospital can be crucial. Patients coming from different backgrounds seek a practitioner from their own community as this makes it easy to communicate. A few important factors which need to be taken care of to avoid conflicts due to diversity are listed below.
Belief
Practitioners from the west look at every problem as a medical issue, but certain people from the ethnic groups count each and every problem as God’s punishment or the influence of some spirit. Lles (1995) points out that the non-western groups are usually not very acceptable to the western way of thinking and hence a practitioner from the same community would be best to understand and act in accordance to their beliefs. This would make working more easy and efficient, especially in a world where meeting somebody from another culture is not uncommon.

Social Care

A nurse that tends to patients that are suffering from severe strokes and seek aid at home causes numerous cultural issues. An Indian patient in the USA was seeking aid and the nurse that was sent to attend to the patient was unaware of the culture of Indians. Indians generally choose to remove their footwear when they enter a person home. The American was unaware of this and it caused much indifference between the nurse and the family. In this situation an Indian nurse would be well aware of the situation and would understand the lifestyle of the patient family better and communicating would be much easier.
Stockholm Public Dental Service
Stockholm Public Dental Service (SPDS) is one of the biggest dental clinic operating in Europe located in Sweden with around 400 000 employees. This giant dental clinic was of late suffering high amounts of loss bearing to the challenge from local dental doctors. The then MD Angeles Bermudez was seeking to do something different in order keep the firm running, she chose to recruit people from different backgrounds, somebody who had something different than the regular people. This resulted in a high turnaround to the firm.
Innovative Ideas: Angeles Bermudez points out that the amount of new ideas, suggestions and innovations have increased drastically. There are so many ideas around the clinic that solving problems becomes all the easier.
Festival: Sweden is a country where the majority of people are Christians and hence Christmas is a national holiday and every employee has an off on this auspicious day. With a diverse workforce, there are many employees working at SPDS that are coming from non-Christian backgrounds and hence this allows the firm to operate even on Christmas.
Starbucks Coffee Shop
Starbucks one of the biggest coffee shop in UK operating in numerous parts of the world. Makes use of much diversity in its workforce in order to grab the market share from all dimensions, Starbucks is constantly seeking to grow and keep changing according to the changing times, it seeks to innovate continuously according to the market situation. Starbucks operates in all four corners of the world and they come together in order to discuss the change in the market and the means that the company needs to adapt (Marvin and Girling, 2000). The regional manager that generally is from the particular region is given a go ahead in his decisions and then share his results of the decision, allowing a two way communication to flow between the employees, customers and the management. This diversity of management according to the culture tends to understand the people of the same culture better; it helps communication between the employees and customers as well, leading to smooth operations in different cultural settings.

Conclusion
Diversity does lead to bringing in more perspectives and ideas into solving various problems. If managed well and if personal differences can be kept aside, diverse teams can produce exceptional results and help organisations go from strength to strength.

References
1. Agcos, C. & Burr, C. (1996) Employment Equity, Affirmative Action and Managing Diversity, Assessing the
Difference. International Journal of Manpower. 17(4/5) p. 30-45
2. Salmon, M.F., Schork, J.M. (2003) Turn diversity to your advantage Research Technology Management, 46(4) p.
47
3. SPDS (2003) – Stockholm Public Dental Service. Available Online: http://www.ftv.sll.se (2003-12-15)
4. Marvin, S. & Girling, G. (2000) what is Managing Diversity and why does it Matter? Human Resource
Development International, 3(4) p. 419-433
5. IIes, P. (1995) Learning to work with difference. Personal Review. 24(6) p. 44-60