Seminar: Naomi Ellemers – Diversity and Organizational Development

Please notice the time change: 14.15 instead of 15.15

The potential benefits of employee and management diversity for organizational development have been clearly documented. Differences in ethnicity or gender can enhance innovation and decision making in task teams, and can improve stakeholder commitment and organizational performance. At the same time, it is not always easy to realize these diversity benefits.

Building a more inclusive team and organizational climate proves to be quite challenging. But failing to do so causes those who are different to get discouraged and opt out, or prevents them from adding value as they adapt to existing ways.

In this talk I will review evidence from experimental and applied research carried out in my lab to address these issues. The results we obtained elucidate some of the unexpected difficulties that are encountered when people with different backgrounds start working together. This work also helps to identify concrete measures that can be taken to build more inclusive work teams and organizations.