Diverse corporate cultures are good, but it's best to encourage workers to embrace the diversity of their personal, sometimes conflicting, beliefs
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Almost every major company proclaims a commitment to diversity. Some do this because it’s the right thing, others because it works well for public relations. Still others do this with the conviction that diversity — differences in where we come from and how we think and what we believe — can provide a wellspring of creativity and innovation.
This final conviction has its share of skeptics. Isn’t some baseline similarity, some level of conformity, necessary to coordinate activities across a firm? Differences, these skeptics argue, are not an asset to be cultivated, but an impediment to be avoided.
For decades, this schism has divided both academic literature and the way in which practitioners shape company culture. A new paper in Administrative Science Quarterly provides a potential way to reconcile the two perspectives: As it turns out, both sides may be correct.
Stanford Graduate School of Business organizational behavior professor Amir Goldberg, with colleagues from McGill University and the University of California, Berkeley, probed this issue using data from Glassdoor, a job recruitment site where people review their employers.
They collected roughly 500,000 reviews from 492 publicly traded companies and analyzed what people wrote:
This piece originally appeared in Stanford Business Insights from Stanford Graduate School of Business. To receive business ideas and insights from Stanford GSB click here: (To sign up: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/about/emails)