Reports about studies on business and diversity tend to make me a little crazy. Most of them set off in search of an answer and find what they set out to find, and then trumpet those findings in a news release.

An example is a recent study by Cedric Herring of the University of Illinois at Chicago.  The news release from the university has this headline: "Businesses Benefit From Diversity, Study Says." That would make you think that the study found that if you increase diversity, your business will benefit.

Here's what the author has to say. "These results suggest that not only is having a diverse work force a good and socially responsible thing for companies to do, but in addition, organizations that broaden their pool of qualified workers also reap material economic benefits from doing so."

Actually, the results suggest nothing of the kind. Like many such studies, this one finds an association between two variables, diversity and profitability in this case, and infers causality. 

But the study doesn't answer the question of cause and effect. We really don't know, from this data, if it's diverse firms that are more profitable, or profitable firms that are more diverse.  We don't know if there's a third factor, perhaps management, which creates both conditions.

Studies like that are the reason I was thrilled to find a great research report on the web site of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The article is titled: "Diverse Backgrounds and Personalities Can Strengthen Groups." Here's the core.

"In a recent article disentangling what researchers have learned over the past 50 years, Margaret A. Neale finds that diversity across dimensions, such as functional expertise, education, or personality, can increase performance by enhancing creativity or group problem-solving. In contrast, more visible diversity, such as race, gender, or age, can have negative effects on a group—at least initially. However, says Neale, fault lines that emerge as a result of such demographic factors can be parlayed to a group’s advantage too."

It's worth reading the entire article, but there were a couple of things that jumped out at me.  One had to do with racial, ethnic and gender diversity.

"One of the most interesting recent findings in the area of work-team performance is that the mere presence of diversity you can see, such as a person’s race or gender, actually cues a team in that there’s likely to be differences of opinion. That cuing turns out to enhance the team’s ability to handle conflict."

A lot of what's here covers the same ground as The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. But, there is one warning worth highlighting.

"One area in which diversity is absolutely, positively a liability, warns Neale, concerns a group’s goals and values.'Conflicts and differences in this area will generally destroy a team,' she says. 'Managers simply must get team members to be in agreement about what the task is and the values that drive its pursuit.' The tone that a manager sets from the very beginning in meetings around a group’s mission and values can go a long way toward bridging diversity along both visible and invisible lines."

Read that last paragraph carefully.  It's up to the manager to get the job done. It's working managers who put work teams together and who lead them.  There are lots of variables at work, one of which is the diversity of the group.  Good research can help us do a better job on all dimensions.  Bad research or bad conclusions from good data just make us crazy.

Wally Bock helps leaders at every level improve the performance and morale of the group they're responsible for. His latest book, Performance Talk: The One-on-One Part of Leadership, makes learning key leadership principles almost effortless because it teaches through a story, the way human beings have always learned complex lessons best.

Performance Talk just got a rave review from Don Blohowiak. Read about it on his Leadership Now blog.