Values of Diversity
...vironment. I haven’t lost any sleep over any of these issues and I continue to perform my job duties. Gender is among the characteristics associated with diversity and is known to influence team behaviors. For example, most women are more comfortable than men with team-based evaluations and rewards. This may be partly due to reasons that most men’s relationships tend to be defined by role and status, while women tend to value relationships based on communication and understanding. While diversity is associated with higher task performance, it has been known to increase conflict resolution, communication difficulties, and lower turnover rates for organizations. For instance, poor sharing of information was the main problem for women, while in the other hand; the main problem for men was unclear or inappropriate expectations. Clearly, gender is just one of the many factors associated with team performance and effectiveness in ones workplace. A co-worker came to me a couple years ago and informed me of an incident where an out of line comment was made. One of the engineers, who is a white female, was upset about a conversation she had with another female, who was African American. Apparently, the African American female gave her a lot of attitude. The engineer later had a conversation with another African American female where she stated that she was never fond of black people and was our director trying to fill some sort of quota by hiring three African Americans in his department. Even thought the comment was not said to me I was offended and felt that this incident should have been brought to the attention of HR. The co-worker that the comment was made to did let the women know that her comment was inappropriate and I have noticed that the women does not walk through our department as much as she used to. Even though the situation seems to be diffused for the time being I feel as if it will happen again mostly because it has not been brought to this woman’s attention that what she said was wrong. Nationality affects a person in numerous interconnected ways, ranging from values, knowledge, and language. Nationality affects one’s values for example, when the group is engaged in a creative task, diversity of values can be expected to be beneficial for group effectiveness. However, when the task is coordinative, involving elaborate interaction among group members, diversity of values can tend to bring about negative results and interfere with the overall group effectiveness. In such a task situation, fluent and reliable coordination is required; debates or tensions over why or how the group is approaching the task will tend to occur when values vary. In addition, disparate values can create interpersonal stress and mistrust that become damaging when the group is faced with a coordinative task. Nationality affects one’s knowledge, or what one knows, assumes, or perceives about the world at hand. Group members of different nationalities possess different knowledge, assumptions, and schema. They possess different information and process new information through their own base of experience and knowledge. Nationality obviously has implications on a person’s language. One’s nationality not only determines what will be one’s primary language, but it also affects the likelihood of knowing other languages and which specific languages will ever be readily comprehended. In short, one’s nationality affects one’s language repertoire. Another example is an individual’s ability with the group’s w...