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Sunday, January 12, 2014

Diversity and Creativity in Teams

In the last byte, we looked at the social benefits of work groups. Today's byte, we shall briefly discuss about the role of diversity and creativity in teams.

We understand that teams are united by their purpose - this is like the shared goal towards which the team-members work, however this doesn’t imply that the team members should be similar or they should all follow a strict defined way to doing things. We are hinting here at the role of similarity (a component of diversity) and creativity in teams.

Dissimilarity amongst team members have varied affects on the team and the individuals involved in terms of the employee's commitment, turnover intentions, beliefs, self-esteem etc. While the dissimilarity also helps in enhancing the creativity given that the same aspects is observed by team members from diverse opinions. This means that creativity could be looked at in a team context and not just the individual context; there could be a process that could help tap the creativity of individuals and solve the work-team challenges.

The creativity aspect in work teams could not just arise for the dissimilarities in the social context, but also the prior experience of the team members. This is also one of the reasons why diversity based on the team composition varying in experience levels and the domains could actually benefit the teams in solving challenging problems.

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