Not Just Diverse, but Also Getting Along - Building Gender Balanced Business

Diversity is critical to corporate success, but it is only a step — diversity must also be accompanied by a level of friendship among team members, new research trumpeted by University of Buffalo School of Management finds.

• Having people on a work team be friends of friends is critical to success.

• Teams with a moderate number of gaps in the network of friends perform better than teams with either very large or very small structural holes among the members.

• Gaps in friend relationships, or “structural holes” are situation where, say, Alice is friends with Bill and Bill is friends with Anne, but Anne does not know Alice. Such gaps suggest different social worlds and diverse pools of knowledge among team members.

• In moderation, such gaps help by allowing the teams to access the various members’ distinct knowledge and then use that knowledge because of good communication among the members.

• Variance in age helps minimize fragmentation among diverse members of a team. Thus, managers seeking more cohesive teams should concentrate on including younger and older members as well as ethnic and gender diversity.

• Prasad Balkundi, assistant professor of organization and human resources in the University at Buffalo School of Management, and co-researchers made the findings after studying 19 work teams at a Fortune 100 manufacturer.

• Balkundi explained: “Fewer structural holes, such as in cliques, may have better communication, but can drive out creativity. On the other hand, completely fragmented groups with large gaps between members cannot even get together to function. This is why moderate levels of structural holes are best.”

The University of Buffalo report on the research