A diverse team can achieve great things. But diversity can sometimes lead to conflict too. The effects of team diversity on team outcomes vary considerably from study to study. This Idea digs deeper, investigating the effects of ‘values diversity’ on team effectiveness – and how leaders can play a significant controlling role in the relationship between values diversity and conflict within a team.
Both conflict and leadership influence the way ‘values diversity’ moderates team effectiveness. Leaders who are more oriented toward task-focused leadership create a strong situation that restricts team members from expressing their individual values, and lessens the extent to which values diversity might lead to team conflict. On the other hand, leaders who are more person-focused in their leadership style legitimize individual team members’ perspectives, creating a weaker team situation that frees the expression of team members’ values and increases the likelihood that team values diversity will lead to conflict.
Data from a residential, team-based, 10-month long American national service program was collected here, where members worked closely and interdependently with one another on a variety of projects, and measured their beliefs about the extent to which they should work hard and stay busy on the job:
As predicted in the hypotheses, task-focused leadership attenuated the effects of values diversity (specifically, work ethic diversity) on team conflict. Person-focused leadership, in contrast, exacerbated the effects of values diversity (specifically, traditionalism diversity) on team conflict. And, team conflict mediated the effects of these interactions on team effectiveness.
These findings suggest that values diversity may indeed be a disruptive force within teams. As a result, it is of great importance to move beyond demographic diversity to consider the effects of deep-level diversity in future studies.
Leader behaviours can either strengthen or lessen the relationship between values diversity and conflict. Specifically:
“Good leadership” then, may not be enough to suppress the negative consequences of values diversity, as both task-focused and person-focused leader behaviours are clearly ‘‘good” in many circumstances.
Leaders play a key role in shaping the consequences of team diversity for team processes and outcomes. Leaders should take caution when leading teams high in values diversity, especially work ethic diversity, to practice task-focused leadership and hold back, especially in teams high in traditionalism diversity, in offering person-focused leadership.
Teammates’ open expression of their differing values may foster unproductive and damaging conflict within the team. When, however, values and expert knowledge are tightly linked, teammates’ open expression of their differing values may be necessary for team effectiveness, as failure to express distinctive values may cause them to withhold their distinctive perspectives and expertise as well.
Ideas for Leaders is a free-to-access site. If you enjoy our content and find it valuable, please consider subscribing to our Developing Leaders Quarterly publication, this presents academic, business and consultant perspectives on leadership issues in a beautifully produced, small volume delivered to your desk four times a year.
For the less than the price of a coffee a week you can read over 650 summaries of research that cost universities over $1 billion to produce.
Use our Ideas to:
Speak to us on how else you can leverage this content to benefit your organization. info@ideasforleaders.com
