What's the difference? Insider perspectives on the importance, content, and meaning of interpersonal differences

Abstract

This study presents a new approach to examine how team members experience interpersonal differences. This approach offers a way to examine how team members experience their differences with specific other individuals, and how these differences are related to the amount of perceived conflict with these individuals in an organizational context. Data from a non-profit governmental institution in The Netherlands were analysed, including 80 participants from 15 diverse teams. Five types of differences were salient to the individuals in this sample: differences related to extraversion; work pose; approach to work; task-related expertise; and seniority. Furthermore, individuals tend to contrast positive and negative evaluations of differences related to extraversion and approaches to work, but to conceptualize positive and negative evaluations of task-related expertise, seniority, and work pose as more mutually independent phenomena. Moreover, we found that differences related to task-related expertise were negatively related to both task and relationship conflict. In contrast, differences related to extraversion were positively related to both task and relationship conflict. Finally, the approach-to-work cluster was positively related to only task conflict.The growth of diversity in the workforce over the past 20 years has spawned a lot of research on how within-unit differences in organizations are related to individuals' attitudes, behaviour, and performance. The conventional focus in these studies has been on connecting differences among team members on such variables as demographic characteristics, tenure, functional background, and educational background to such outcomes as team commitment, citizenship behaviour,

Social Category Salience Moderates the Effect of Diversity Faultlines on Information Elaboration

“…The participants were asked to write down three features that in their view differentiated group members from each other. In Oosterhof et al (2009), participants also reported an average of three differences per relationship. For each feature, participants were asked how strong they perceived this difference in the group to be (from 1 = not strong to 5 = very strong).…”

“…We are aware of one other study that follows these notions and that investigated perceived social categories without restraining participants to a set of predetermined categories. Oosterhof, van der Vegt, van de Vliert, Sanders, and Kiers (2009) asked 80 members of different teams of a nonprofit organization about attributes that they perceive as differentiating them from their colleagues. In response, participants named 497 dissimilarity attributes-an average of almost three attributes per colleague.…”

Managing diverse teams by enhancing team identification: The mediating role of perceived diversity

“…Meyer, Shemla, Wegge, & Li, 2015). This type of perceived diversity assesses the global perception of diversity across the limitless dimensions of diversity that exist in any team (Oosterhof, van der Vegt, van de Vliert, Sanders & Kiers, 2009). An example use of this type can be found in a paper by Jehn and Bezrukova (2010) who asked participants to rate the degree to which their team was split into subgroups, broke into alliances, and divided into subsets of individuals.…”

Perceived Diversity and Team Functioning

“…Measuring objective levels of diversity (based on, for example, team members' age or educational specializations) is problematic insofar as it presupposes that such characteristics are all salient to team members. Indeed, it has been shown that different aspects of diversity can be salient for different people (see Oosterhof, van der Vegt, van de Vliert, Sanders, & Kiers, 2009). In fact, Harrison, Newman, and Roth (2006) advised researchers to conceptualize an attribute of interest at a high level of abstraction when investigating work behavior through attitudes of team members.…”