Diversity Impacts A Corporation's Bottom Line
Racial diversity in the workplace can enhance performance in an organization where a positive racial learning environment (RLE) exists, says a Harvard University professor who will speak on campus this week.
Robin Ely is an associate professor of organizational behavior at Harvard Business School, where she co-wrote a paper with fellow Harvard professor David Thomas entitled, "Team Learning and the Link between Diversity and Performance."
Ely will discuss results of the paper and the concrete benefits of a diverse workforce at 4 p.m. Nov. 17 in the Johnson Rooms on the third floor of the Lurie Engineering Center on North Campus. The event is free and open to the public.
In its defense of the affirmative action lawsuits filed in 2003, the University presented extensive research supporting the benefits of a diverse academic environment. Ely, who investigates how organizations can better manage race and gender relations, while at the same time increasing their effectiveness, will discuss if such benefits apply outside of academia and if they can benefit a corporation's bottom line.
In the paper, Ely and Thomas investigated the impact of a work group's RLE on the relationship between racial diversity and bottom-line performance by analyzing two years of demographic, survey and performance data from more than 240 retail bank branches.
A bank's RLE was considered positive if both white and minority employees felt that the group welcomed a diversity of views, and was negative if minority employees, at least, did not.
" ... Racially diverse branches with positive RLEs outperformed their counterparts with negative RLEs on two of the three performance measures," Ely and Thomas wrote. In a follow-up, in-depth study of five branches, they found that "employees in branches with positive RLEs described using their racial diversity as a resource for learning, while employees in branches with negative RLEs embraced a color-blind...
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