Diversity in Distributed Decision Making: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Diversity is defined as the differences among factors like ethnicity, gender, culture, sexuality and anything that makes two entities different from each other. Diversity creates a heterogeneous environment and is becoming an inherent part of all groups, especially virtual groups that consist of geographically distributed members.This paper studies diversity in the context of virtual groups that work together in an online environment and its effect on group performance. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, we can learn from groups used in on-line courses and extend those experiences to geographically distributed groups. The members of a typical e-learning group are different in race, gender, countries and backgrounds mimicking diversity that is often related to geographically distributed teams. A longitudinal experiment involving online classes was conducted and the results are reported. Our research revealed that diverse groups are not good for ad-hoc tasks but maybe good for on-going tasks. Future research areas are also discussed.

Functional Diversity and Its Impact on Distributed Groups: An Exploratory Study

“…Organizations must learn how to manage people of different color, race, national origin, religion and others. Understanding information sharing and decision-making in diverse teams is also becoming important [1,12,40,57,58]. Williams & O'Reilly (1998) examined over forty years of research and have provided a comprehensive review of literature.…”

“…Group process is the e-learning environment where groups exchange and share ideas. Several researchers [1,8,38,40,66] have suggested model(s) to study the impact of contextual variables in learning environments. We have modified their model to include informational/decision making (deep) variable, functional diversity, for this experiment (see Figure 1) …”

“…Based on previous research [1,7,23] we have taken an optimist view of diversity, in the sense that diversity improves group decision making. Contextual variables, as already mentioned, include surface and deep variables.…”

Decision Making in Diverse Swift Teams: An Exploratory Study

“…There is an abundance of research in the areas of group working, how groups make decisions, and emerging leaders in groups [9,23,76, etc.]. It is well established that diversity brings a wealth of knowledge to the group [16,17,20,24,53,62,63,67,69,71], however, diverse group effectiveness is still a debatable issue see [2,23,34,40,56] for complete review. Many researchers [44,52,53,62,67] agree that diverse groups, if managed properly, can provide a positive effect.…”

“…Organizations must learn how to manage people of different color, race, national origin, religion and others. Understanding decision-making in diverse teams is also becoming important [2,11,14,22,41,65,67].…”