Dealing with diversity in workgroups: Preventing problems and promoting potential

Abstract

Diversity is a popular topic among academics and practitioners alike. It is also a topic that is surrounded with controversies and passionate opinions. This makes understanding the ambiguous consequences of diversity a highly interesting and puzzling endeavor. To facilitate understanding of diversity's effects in workgroups, I present an overview of the state-of-the-art in diversity research and discuss the potential problems and benefits that are associated with group diversity. Moreover, I discuss how research on diversity interventions uses this problems versus potential approach to distinguish moderators of diversity's effects. Based on this overview, I argue that similar to the importance of contingencies for predicting diversity's effects, contingencies also play a crucial role in predicting the effectiveness of diversity interventions. As such, the current overview stresses the lack of main effects of both diversity and diversity interventions. Finally, I discuss recent work illustrating these contingencies and conclude that positive diversity mindsets-favorable mental representations of group diversity-are a necessary prerequisite to prevent problems and promote potential of group diversity. ---This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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