ECON 1 Lecture 18:
Document Summary
Creating value with diverse teams in global management. Diverse teams should create significant competitive advantage by bringing together different ideas, pools of knowledge, and approaches to work. In practice, members clash, and the teams are either paralyzed into inaction or worse. Diverse teams can be more creative, generate more and better alternatives to problems, and generate more and better criteria for evaluating alternatives. Diverse teams tend to perform either better or worse than homogenous ones, with more performing worse than better. Three steps to creating value: map, bridge, integrate. Map: described the differences among members and the impact of those differences in objective measurable ways. Bridge: communicated in ways that explicitly took the differences into account. Integrating: created team-level ideas by carefully monitoring participation patterns, resolving disagreements, and creating new perspectives. Mapping differences develops an appreciation of how they affect teamwork. Three steps to the mapping principle: selecting which characteristics to map, describing members" characteristics, identifying their impact.
