Let’s put diversity into perspective: How different diversity perspectives in multicultural teams relate to team conflict and team performance.

Abstract

The main aim of this study was to explore whether different diversity perspectives (integration-and-learning, acces-and-legitimacy and the discrimination-and-fairness perspective), proposed by Ely & Thomas (2001), could be distinghuished from each other in quantitative analyses. Furthermore, this study examines the degree to which the different diversity perspectives relate to two types of conflict (i.e. task conflict, relationship conflict) and team performance in multicultural teams. Selfreported data were collected in 22 Dutch healthcare teams among 8 healthcare organizations with a total number of 212 participants (N=212). Results showed that the three diversity perspectives could be reliably distinghuished from one another. Furthermore, results indicated that the integration-and-learning perspective relates to relational conflict and team performance, whereas the other two diversity perspectives were neither related to conflict nor team performance. Moreover, task conflict did not relate to team performance, while relationship conflict was detrimental to team performance. Finally, relational conflict only partially mediated the direct and positive relationship between integration-and-learning perspective and team performance.