Diversity in Change Teams
Diversity in change teams means including members who differ in function, level, background, experience and ways of thinking. Diversity in change teams widens the range of perspectives on risks, options and how people will react, but it can also slow decisions and raise early conflict. Psychological safety helps a team turn its diversity into better decisions.
Quick facts
- Type
- Concept (team composition)
- Origin
- Work group diversity research, e.g. van Knippenberg, De Dreu & Homan (2004); van Knippenberg & Schippers (2007)
- Used when
- Forming a change team, steering group or change agent network
- Related models
- Psychological safety · Lencioni's five dysfunctions · Tuckman's stages
- Exam relevance
- APMG CM Foundation, Change Leadership & Teams (CT0207); Practitioner (CT0305)
What are the advantages of diversity in a change team?
A change team decides how a change will land on many different groups. Diversity brings those groups' realities into the room.
- Wider perspectives: members with different knowledge and experience see different risks and options.
- Less groupthink: a team whose members share the same assumptions is more likely to converge too early on one view.
- Better anticipation of reactions: people from the affected areas can predict how colleagues will respond, and why.
- Credibility: a change designed with people who look like the affected groups is easier to trust.
Diversity in a change team is therefore a way of testing a change against reality before it reaches the people affected.
What are the disadvantages of diversity in a change team?
Diversity has costs, especially early in a team's life:
- Slower decisions: more viewpoints take longer to hear and reconcile. Homogeneous teams often agree faster.
- More conflict: differences in assumptions and priorities surface as disagreement, at least at first.
- Communication effort: different professional languages and working styles cause misunderstandings.
- Subgroups: when several differences line up, for example function, site and seniority, a team can split into camps. Researchers call these lines faultlines (Lau & Murnighan, 1998).
Diversity in a change team is therefore an investment: it costs time and attention before it pays back.
When does diversity improve team performance?
Research on work group diversity gives mixed results: diversity sometimes improves performance and sometimes harms it. Van Knippenberg, De Dreu and Homan (2004) proposed an explanation. Diversity helps when the team actually elaborates its different information, by sharing, discussing and combining it. It harms when members categorize each other into "us and them" groups, which damages cooperation.
The benefit is therefore not automatic. It depends on the task, on whether members' differences are relevant to it, and on how the team works together. Van Knippenberg and colleagues (2004) expect this to matter most on complex, non-routine tasks, such as designing a change.
Diversity in a change team is therefore a potential, which the team's way of working either realizes or wastes.
Why does psychological safety matter for diverse teams?
Different perspectives only help if members voice them, including when they contradict the majority or a senior colleague. Speaking up is an interpersonal risk. In a team without psychological safety, people with minority views stay quiet, and the team behaves like a homogeneous one while keeping the costs of diversity.
Psychological safety does not remove differences or mean that the majority view wins. It makes disagreement acceptable, so differences are used rather than suppressed.
At Larchfield Logistics, a change team for a new depot layout includes drivers, planners, finance and a safety officer. The chair asks each member in turn for concerns before decisions and treats objections as information. The safety officer's early challenge changes the design before it is built.
Psychological safety is therefore the condition that lets a diverse change team benefit from its diversity.
Team diversity vs. psychological safety: what is the difference?
| Team diversity | Psychological safety | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A feature of the team's composition | A shared belief about interpersonal risk in the team |
| Set by | Who is chosen for the team | How leaders and members behave over time |
| Contribution | A wider range of knowledge and viewpoints | Willingness to voice those viewpoints |
| Risk if absent | Groupthink and blind spots | Silence, hidden problems and unused perspectives |
Diversity supplies the different perspectives; psychological safety lets the team hear and use them.
Exam focus
At Foundation level (CT0207) expect the advantages and disadvantages of diversity in a team, and the role of psychological safety in realizing its benefits. A common trap presents diversity as producing faster agreement or no conflict; another defines psychological safety as removing differences or always accepting the majority view.
Practise this syllabus area →FAQ
What are the benefits of diversity in teams?
Diverse teams bring a wider range of knowledge, experience and viewpoints. This can improve problem solving, reduce groupthink and, in a change team, help anticipate how different groups will react. The benefits depend on the team sharing and discussing its different views.
What are the disadvantages of diverse teams?
Diverse teams can take longer to decide, experience more conflict at first, face communication difficulties and split into subgroups when several differences line up. These costs are usually highest early in the team's life and can be reduced by how the team is led.
What types of diversity matter in a change team?
Both demographic diversity, such as age, gender and background, and job-related diversity, such as function, level, location and expertise. For a change team, including people from each affected area is often the most directly useful form, because they know how the change will land.
How do you get the benefits of a diverse team?
Build psychological safety so members voice different views, give the team time to share and discuss information, use structured ways to hear every member before decisions, and watch for subgroups forming along functional or site lines.
Sources
- van Knippenberg, D., De Dreu, C. K. W. & Homan, A. C. (2004). Work group diversity and group performance: An integrative model and research agenda. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89(6), 1008–1022.
- van Knippenberg, D. & Schippers, M. C. (2007). Work group diversity. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 515–541.
- Lau, D. C. & Murnighan, J. K. (1998). Demographic diversity and faultlines: The compositional dynamics of organizational groups. Academy of Management Review, 23(2), 325–340.
- Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
- APMG International — Change Management certification (syllabus topic CT0207)
- Last reviewed