The idea that diverse teams make better decisions than homogenous groups is a guiding principle behind many executive education programs. But few topics in the business world can be as polarizing as workplace diversity.
That shouldn’t be the case, said researcher Scott Page, who directs the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan.
“When I walk into the business world and say ‘It’s valuable to have somebody with a different background because they have a different perspective,’ that somehow sounds like a political statement,” Page said. “The point is, it’s really not. There’s a sort of mathematical truth or logic behind it.”
Diversity has power because people with different experiences are likely to categorize the world in different ways, Page explained. Making decisions based on the combination of those perceptions gives better results than relying on a single perspective.
Recent research supports that notion. In one study, a pair of UM professors analyzed more than 4,300 Wikipedia articles and found that bigger crowds led to better performance when the crowd was more diverse. In another, economists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and George Washington University found that switching from a single-gender office to an evenly split environment would increase revenue as much as 41 percent.
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