Diversity Won't Make Your Company More (Or Less) Productive
A new study shows that when it comes to performance, there isn’t much to either fear or to gain from diversifying.
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Does diversity make the workplace more productive? In some corners, it’s taken as an article of faith that diversity is a massive contributor to team performance.
One statistic frequently used to support this argument is that “diverse teams make better decisions 87 percent of the time.” This claim, widely circulated in both popular and business media, originates from a study conducted by a tech start-up called Cloverpop.
But there are reasons to be skeptical of that data point, as well as the general argument that diversity has a big effect on team performance.
First, any sweeping claim that relies on a single study deserves a second look. As one New York Times op-ed correctly laid out, the Cloverpop study actually found that “teams that were gender and geographically diverse and had at least one age gap of 20 years or more, made better decisions than individuals 87 percent of the time.” Comparing diverse teams to individuals is different from comparing diverse teams to non-diverse teams, and while the Times got it right, elsewhere, the statistic is used without that context.
A new meta-analysis—which looked at hundreds of studies across the globe that studied the impact of different forms of diversity on team performance—offers a more nuanced picture. It contradicts the claim that diversity always enhances team performance. Interestingly, it also contradicts the counter-claim that diversity is inherently harmful to team cohesion and output.
Lukas Wallrich, a psychology researcher at Birkbeck Business School in London, explained to me in an interview that he has long been interested in the impact of diversity on workplaces. So he and his team conducted the meta-analysis to figure out what we know about diversity and team performance.
They categorized the theoretical impacts of diversity into roughly two camps—that diversity can improve performance by bringing new perspectives to the table, and that it might increase conflict by making communication and cohesion more difficult. What they found, after combing through the studies as part of the meta-analysis, is that the two effects may result in a wash.
Overall, they found a positive effect from diversity—defined broadly across different geographical contexts in terms of age, race, gender or a similar category—but it was very small. The impact was also dependent on context. “For example, contexts that are directly about creative and innovation or research and development, there we see more positive relationships between diversity and team performance,” he said.
But in contexts where teams simply have to get routine tasks accomplished, Wallrich noted that while there “are still reasons to create equality of opportunity … it’s probably not worth [it] to diversify teams just for the sake of diversity.”
Yet Wallrich emphasized that “there’s definitely no evidence that there would be harm on average,” either. Meaning that when it comes to workplace performance, your average workplace doesn’t have a lot to fear or a lot to gain from diversifying. “I don’t think it’s entirely surprising, [the two effects] cancel each other out,” he said.
The lesson from Walrich’s meta-analysis is that maybe we should all take a deep breath and stop promoting diversity as either a cure-all or a civilizational disaster. There are upsides and downsides to having more diversity—whether it means racial diversity, age diversity, gender, or other kinds.
But the good news is that they all tend to sort of balance each other out, and that maybe we should be more focused on making sure everyone has access to good opportunities and supporting them when they are able to land those roles than fixating on creating a particular gender or race mix.
Zaid Jilani is a freelance journalist who maintains his own Substack newsletter at The American Saga.
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Thank you for this article. Earlier this year, I analyzed the "landmark" Herrick and McKinsey studies, which allegedly established that diversity made businesses more profitable. The Herrick study alone had over 1800 academic citations.
https://jensheycke.substack.com/p/dei-studies-that-prove-nothing
It was complete garbage: due to an amateur-hour coding error, companies for which sales were unknown were coded as $88,888,888,888! And that was just the beginning. Yet it was widely praised and cited for nearly a decade -- until some more conscientious researchers exposed its flaws.
When researchers believe so strongly in a particular cause and wish for a particular outcome so much, objective studies are elusive.
I have a long corporate career where I have been responsible for overseeing all the projects of the company. My project managers form project teams made up of key resources that are the knowledge experts representing the key functional stakeholders to the change that would take place from the outcomes of the project.
Superficial diversity, the type that is pushed by the left and has been politically weaponized as DEI, part of the toxic and parasitic mind virus of Theory, is not only useless, it is destructive in terms of achieving the best project performance. Because nothing matters more in the makeup of the project team resources than does the individual capabilities of those individuals. The same is true for functional work teams.
Diversity in this case is a strength only when being defined as diversity of roles, but only too if the team selected covers are subject matter domains required. Pursuing goals of diversity of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., is worthless and disruptive. It is sub-optimizing because it replaces the need to carefully select based on merit.
The whole can be greater than the sum of its parts with respect to collaborative work, but not when the group dynamic is upset with a mismatch of capability levels because of superficial diversity criteria in selecting resources.