How diversity can be leveraged to drive organizational performance

Greater diversity doesn’t necessarily equal better performance, and organizations still have to be mindful of how diversity is managed in order to improve performance, writes Richard Holden

Breaking down the old boys’ club in business, government, and other organizations is intrinsically important. Ensuring greater diversity in organizations – on gender, racial, ethnic, and other lines – is, simply put, the right thing to do.

But some advocates of greater diversity make an extra claim: that it improves the quality of decisions, and hence an organization’s performance. Do the right thing and increase profits or effectiveness. What’s not to like?

Robust empirical evidence to support this claim – that more diverse organizations perform better – is tricky to provide. One can look at more diverse organizations and compare them to less diverse ones. Suppose that more diverse organizations do, in fact, perform better. What does one conclude?

Well, what one should definitely not…