The Positive Impact Of Team Diversity And Decision Making

Recent years, organisation are much more relay on diversity teams to developing products, making decisions and also gain the business success (When and how), therefore diversity team are becoming a very important element for the organisations. In USA, diversity usually refer to demographic characteristics such as age, gender, and ethnicity, however, diversity is not only refer to demographics, it also means the diversity in psychological characteristics like skills, personality, abilities, and education backgrounds (book diversity). Although team diversity leads to some benefits like the positive organisational cooperation, share the knowledge and experience, it can also leads some problems to the organisation, such as the tension between members

Indeed some research found that the team diversity have positive impact to decision making. For example, one of the research found that the diversity at educational level can positively influence the decision making and also affected on team performance (Simons). In addition, Dooley and Frywell illustrated that the discussion and argument was associated with quality decision making in U.S. hospital. However, some researches also demonstrated that the diversity in the team can have negative influence on decision making. For example, Sounder () found that, in diversity teams, because of the lots of difference between team members, sometimes its difficult to reach an agreement. Although, sometimes diversity in the team can improve the quality of decision making, it also increase the conflict within the team members, and impede the cooperation

In the early research by Gassman (1467), he illustrated that although diversity in the team result language barriers and cultural differences are occurred frequently, some benefits can still be found, for example, open up opportunities. Another experiment in problem solving creativity found that, the team which composed of people have different attitudes and perspectives were much better than the team which composed of people with similar attitudes (Triandis). Although diversity in team members has been shown some advantages for creativity and innovation, there still some research and experiment demonstrated that there are no relationships between team member diversity and team performance or the diversity in team members have negative impact on creativity and innovation. Ochse (1990) illustrated that creativity may be impeded if the team member is quite knowledgeable at their own area. Another study from Diehl (1992), demonstrated that, although team member diversity did increase the team ability of creative ideas, it not mean that diversity teams are outperform homogeneous teams. As these researchers explored, diversity in team members, not only bring positive influence but also the negative