M. ANTINO (U Complutense de Madrid). Managing diversity in the workplace: Contributions of the Work & Organizational Psychology

Organizations are increasingly depending on diverse teams for developing innovative products, making important decisions and improving organizational effectiveness. As diversity has become a fact of organizational life, understanding its impact on team functioning and performance has become one of the major challenges for organizational theory and practice. In the last 25 years, organizational diversity scholars have largely and increasingly employed the concept of team faultlines ("[...] hypothetical dividing lines that may split a group into subgroups based on one or more attributes." Lau & Murnighan, 1998, p. 328) to better understand the relationship between diversity and team processes and outcomes. Accumulated empirical evidence shows that faultline-based alignments can create fractures within the team that have the potential to inhibit essential processes such as group information elaboration and also outcomes, such as decision quality, accuracy and innovation.