A DVANTAGES OF D IVERSITY

and socially ‘correct’ in their behaviour and opinions. To further ensure the continuation of a team, they will attempt to avoid conflict with the others resulting in conformity of individual goals. People in a common situation will, therefore in time, come to perceive themselves as similar to each other. This, plus the motive to be ‘at one’ with the others, will result in the feeling that

‘we’ are a team. West (2004) illustrates that most people would go along with the majority view, even though they are aware that this is the incorrect line.

There are according to Nemeth (1997) two primary reasons for adopting majority viewpoints, even when incorrect. One is that people assume that truth lies in numbers and are quick to infer that they themselves are incorrect when faced with a unanimous majority. The other reason is that they fear disapproval and rejection for being different. When individuals are faced with a majority they search for information in a biased manner, as they consider primarily information that confirms the majority position.

problem solving. These studies have proved diversity to cause variations and originality and to help avoiding groupthink, which will be reviewed below.

The most apparent result, which diversity is supposed to create is variations - variations in perceptions, values, ideas, opinions, and methods, which are highly essential for developing a stimulating creative environment. According to Aldrich (1999), any deviation from routine or tradition is a variation—the higher the frequency of variations, the better the opportunities for change.

Campbell (1960) argues that the existence of variation in fact is fundamental to all inductive achievements and to all increases in knowledge. Therefore, diversity, and the variation it causes, is fundamental to the process of change.

The only way we can move ahead is by performing continual breakout from the bounds of what was already known, a breakout for which variation provides the only mechanism available. Pursuing diversity is important because it helps generate and sustain organizational heterogeneity that would otherwise disappear because of pressures to homogeneity. Organizational variation is a result of organizational values, which according to Aldrich (1999) include an allowance for irrational every day behavior manifested in experimentation, playfulness, laughter and forgetting, mistakes, luck, imitation, passion, misunderstandings, surprises, idle curiosity and randomness.

Several studies have been conducted on the influence of majority and minority viewpoints (e.g. Nemeth, 1983, Nemeth, 1986, Nemeth, 1997, Nemeth et al., 2001, Nemeth and Kwan, 1985, Nemeth and Kwan, 1987, Nemeth and Wachtler, 1983), where a number of experimental designs reveal that subjects exposed to minority views are more creative than subjects exposed to majority views. The presence of dissenting minority views seem to stimulate more originality than the individual would ordinarily manifest (Nemeth and Kwan,

1985). Additionally, Nemeth et al. (1983) discovers that subjects exposed to a minority view are specifically stimulated to make novel judgments and to find new solutions to a problem. Majority influence, on the other hand, is seen to force a decision between two alternatives, the position of the majority or the information from one’s own senses. Subjects either conform exactly to the majority view or tend to remain independent. That is, the experience of a majority view seems to restrict creativity, as it exerts a powerful pressure to conform. In another study Nemeth et al. (1987) found that majority influence narrows the range of considerations to solve a problem, and for minority influence to widen the range of considerations to include novel strategies.

Nemeth (1997) continues by arguing that one must feel free to deviate from expectations, to question shared ways of viewing things, in order to evidence creativity - one must be able to look ‘outside the box’ to find new insights.

Minority viewpoints have importance and power, not just for the value of the ideas themselves but also for their ability to stimulate creative thoughts. Thus, one must learn not only to respect and tolerate dissent—but to welcome it.

Besides leading to more creativity, minorities tend to have a more positive reaction on diversity initiatives (Kossek and Zonia, 1993). That is, they are more open to co-workers’ diversity, which again affect the willingness to express divergent views.

The restraint of a locked majority view has been further analyzed under the term groupthink. The term groupthink was invented by Janis (1972), who suggested that highly cohesive groups may be ‘victims of groupthink’. The independent judgments of individual members are affected by the group’s level of cohesiveness. Members seek the group’s judgment in the belief that the judgments on which group members concur are inevitably superior to judgments made by any one member. In this way members employ group thought as the basis or standard for determining their own individual thinking.

Members thus suspend their own critical thinking in favor of group beliefs, which stems from concurrence. They probably feel implicitly that their group is invulnerable to bad decisions. One of the characteristics of groupthink is strong in-group loyalty and a belief that people outside their own group are less capable and less aware of important information. Also, the phenomenon of groupthink gives members an illusion of unanimity. Groupthink typically implies ineffective or poor decision-making. The ineffectiveness of the decision-making process results from the members’ suspension of their critical faculties blinded by the goal of consensus. A period of interaction involving conflict over ideas and critical idea testing is normal and typical of the group process. Groupthink, however, short-circuits this natural group process and proceeds directly to agreement, which is likely to result in decisions of poor quality. Groupthink is, thus, a phenomenon that inhibits conflict and results in defective and low quality decisions that achieve consensus. As Chatman, Polzer, Barsade and Neale (1998) argue, individuals sacrifice themselves in favor of the group. Increasing sense of in-group membership causes a de-personalization of the self, as the individual member perceives himself as an interchangeable archetype of the social category. Members of strong in-groups are more likely to cooperate with in-group members and to compete against out-group members. Nemeth et al. (2001) also finds that groups often make agreements at the expense of quality of discussions or decisions. People converge both in the rate of ideas and the type of ideas that are generated. In her 2001 analysis she attempts to identify solutions to escape groupthink. Janis (1972) offered several recommendations for escaping groupthink including the use of outside experts, meetings of subgroups, and the use of devil’s advocate, where the role of the devil’s advocate is to purposely criticize plans and ideas under consideration by a group, to force them to think twice and produce better arguments. The hope is that such dissent will thwart the rush to judgment and instead foster discussion, a consideration of more alternatives and careful examination of the available information.