One of the most significant challenges in relation to management in today’s society is how to embrace and include diversity within companies and teams. It is a concept that has only come to surface in the more recent years and is still being adapted into many organisations around the world. Diversity is defined as representing all the ways people are unlike and alike – the differences and similarities in age, gender, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, capabilities and socioeconomic background (Kinicki, Scott-Ladd, Perry, Williams, 2015). Diversity is about looking at differences and similarities together rather than as two separate elements. Lee Gardenswartz and Anita Rowe, two experts on diversity, have come up with …show more content…
These are forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. During this process people discover how they work with other people’s personalities as well as dealing with any possible conflicts before completing the task they have been given. There are also three fundamental considerations that must be made when building a group into a successful team. These are cooperation, trust, cohesiveness. Trust is defined as reciprocal faith in others’ intensions and behaviours (Kinicki et al, 2015). IBM’s mission statement is “Let’s build a smarter planet” and part of the plan to achieve this is to have open communication, trust and teamwork. IBM had a team of artificial intelligence researchers programme a computing system called Watson to participate in the game show Jeopardy. Watson beat all other previous (human) winners and this success was down to the trust within the team. Working as a team allows people to work together and generate more innovative ideas which often leads to a successful outcome. Teamwork can increase productivity, increase speed, reduce costs, improve quality, reduces destructive internal competition and improve workplace cohesiveness. Working in a group where there is trust, cohesiveness and cooperation can make such a difference in terms of how successful a team …show more content…
Diversity and teamwork about both involve an element of how people interact with each other. This is obvious for teamwork in the sense that it is how people work together, but with diversity it is a little more complex. Diversity is largely about how someone accepts a person’s differences and similarities which then affects how they act and work with this person. However, diversity also involves an individual component about people’s individual characteristics, as seen with the diversity wheel. Teamwork is a lot more about how people work together to reach a common goal and focuses more on how people’s personalities and individual characteristics work together to produce creative ideas that lead to success. With teamwork, the key idea of this concept is that everyone works together but with diversity, the key idea is how people are different and how this contributes not only to the success of a business (or team), but also how it contributes towards the growth of