MGT 500 Lecture 88: Group property 6

• School: Ball State University
• Department: Management
• Course: MGT 500
• Professor: Ronda Smith

Document Summary

The final group property is diversity of the membership of a group. This is also the degree that group members are similar to, or different from, each other. Overall, there are costs and benefits from diversity in groups. This is especially true in the earlier stages of a tenure of a group. This lowers the morale of the group and raises rates of dropout. Groups where the values or opinions of the members differ normally tend to experience more conflict in the group. However, leaders who can get the group focused on the task and encourage learning of the group can reduce the conflicts and enhance group discussions about the group"s issues. Gender diversity can be a group challenge, but if there is stressed inclusiveness, conflict among a group and group dissatisfaction can be lowered. Surface-level diversity can be seen in characteristics like: This alerts people to potential deep-level diversity in underlying attitudes, opinions, and values.