MGT5OBR Organisational Behaviour - Assignment

Article Analysis 1
Mgt5obr Organisational Behaviour Assessment 2: Individual Assignment
Article Analysis
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Article Analysis 2
Table of Contents
Introduction...........................................................................................................................................3
Summary of Each Article........................................................................................................................3
Article 1.............................................................................................................................................3
Article 2.............................................................................................................................................4
Article 3.............................................................................................................................................6
Analysis of Articles.................................................................................................................................7
Diversity at the Workplace................................................................................................................7
Diversity Training Programmes..........................................................................................................7
Recommendations.................................................................................................................................8
Diversity Training Programmes..........................................................................................................8
Formation of diversified teams..........................................................................................................8
Conclusion.............................................................................................................................................8
References.............................................................................................................................................9

Article Analysis 3
Introduction
Diversity in organizations cuts across teams, rational demography, as well as
organizational diversity to achieve innovation, decision making, and attraction of talented
staff. Despite its importance, diversity at the workplace might fail to achieve expected
benefits when there is increased conflict, lower morale among employees, and poor
performance. This paper analyses three journal articles to understand their perspective
about diversity. The first selected article is by Guillaume, et al (2017). The article examines a
number of factors that moderates the effects of workplace diversity. The second article
selected from the library is by Lai, Lam and Lam (2013). The authors use a team cultural
perspective to understand behaviours among groups. The third article by Kalinoski, et al
(2013) focuses on the idea of outcome of diversity training. The entire paper is divided into
three major sections. The second section presents a summary of each of the three articles.
The paper does this by identifying key concepts and main points like theoretical concepts.
The third section analyses the three articles in terms of common and contrasting concepts.
The last section provides 2 concise recommendations to managers on ways of dealing with
diversified workplace.
Summary of Each Article
Article 1
The first article is by Guillaume, et al (2017) applies Categorization-Elaboration
model to form the basis of a theoretical lens. The article presents a review of several
variables that moderate the effects of workplace diversity to achieve well-being, positive
performance, and social integration among employees. Guillaume, et al focus on factors
that managers and organizations can control such as individual differences, culture,
leadership, human resource, unit design, as well as strategy. CEM considers diversity as
differences that occur among individuals in terms of attributes. Furthermore, CEM maintain
that diversity embraces intergroup bias that comes out of social interaction and
information-elaboration processes. The inter-group bias involves favourable responses that
arise from within the group than outside the group. While on the other hand, the

Article Analysis 4
information-elaboration refers to exchange, perspectives, discussions, and individual-level
processes that make people to come together to exchange information.
The findings from the review show that strategies that target to achieve growth and
support diversity, moderate organizational diversity to achieve higher performance.
Organizations design strategies that seek to promote value-in diversity and task relevant
information. Consequently, it contributes towards better decision making and innovation
among employees. However, any downsizing strategy would lead to undermining of
performance in the manner in which it supports intergroup bias hence, limiting
demographic differences. The second finding shows that cross-categorization limits
intergroup bias and enhances social integration, well-being, as well as performance.
Furthermore, the article found that work group diversity play a major role in achieving
positive results. Any forms of demographic diversity whether organizational or individual
facilitates innovation only when related to task-based knowledge. However, they found that
the nature of the team or setting of an industry does not play any role in determining overall
performance. Most importantly, they argue that when people from different cultures come
together, they coordinate to eliminate cases of acting individually and personal behaviour.
An interesting finding from the study is that situations that are characterised by autonomy,
serve the role of supporting clear roles, decision making, shared objectives, and facilitation
of positive diversity effects. Furthermore, differences among individuals in terms of diversity
beliefs, learning goal orientation, need for recognition, and openness, they enhance social
integration through intergroup contact, information-elaboration.
Article 2
The second article by Lai, Lam and Lam (2013) looks that the team cultural
perspective in order to understand organizational citizen behaviour while working to
achieve the set objectives. Culture that occur within groups and among different
organizations, shape how employees perform their tasks in socially as psychologically
environment. Culture comes out as an important form that influences the manner in which
individual develop their attention, make decisions, and guide their behaviour as attitudes. It
is from such an understanding that team culture comes out as being the sets of shared,
internalised assumptions, beliefs, norms, and values that every member of a team develops
to shape how one performs the task. They argue that no one can perform a task along

Article Analysis 5
without involving others within a social and psychological environment. A majority of
employees must coordinate with one another in order to achieve positive performance at
the workplace. The article illustrates that human resources managers could form teams
where members come from diversified cultural backgrounds to help them develop an
innovative product. Diversified groups enable members with different talents from varying
functional areas to facilitate their innovativeness and creativity. Second, members of a team
must also show a high level of mindful of the needs and requirements as well as the
standards of other team members to work effectively. The fact that no one can work in
isolation, it is critical to understand that everyone in a team must work towards developing
and strengthening cultural norms to stand a better chance of shaping behaviours of other
members. More specifically, this should be so when they understand that their behaviours
would contribute towards sustainability of the team. Third, article argues that different
teams cannot develop similar culture but that they might end up developing different
cultures that enhance effective operation. It is from such difference that makes team
cultures to play important roles in shaping the social environment to achieve positive
performance. Lai, et al (2013) was motivated to focus on culture as one aspect of diversity
that shapes organizational behaviours towards in-roles as extra-role behaviour. The focus of
the paper was therefore, to develop a better understanding of how team culture influences
organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB).
Lai et al. (2013) formulated their theory by focusing on OCB that targets
organizations (OCBO) and one that targets individuals (OCBI). They argue that the need to
differentiate the two focus points is because of association of OCB with varying
consequences, antecedents, behaviours, and correlates. Additionally, they note that
differential impacts from OCBI and OCBO towards job performance might make managers
opt for behaviours that increase performance at the work place. For instance, the social
orientation of an individual whether it is self-motivated or socially motivated, it is
imperative to develop a deeper understanding concerning the type of OCB employees are
likely to perform.
Alai et al (2013) formulate four hypotheses. Two hypotheses relate to OCBO within
collectivistic teams while two were related to OCB within individualistic teams. Collective
teams are those whose members come from cultures of collectivism. In the first case for
instance, they were of the view that positive relationship arising from OCBI and

Article Analysis 6
performance rating remain either stronger or weaker when teams work together as a
collective culture than a less collectivistic teal culture. While in the second case, they
hypothesized that there occurs a positive relationship between OCB and performance rating
in either a strong or weaker individualistic team cultures or less individualistic teal team
cultures. Individualist team in this case, is considered as whose members come from
individualistic cultures and exhibit individualistic norms or behaviours.
The analysis of primary data collected from a multiple team of 403 employees
working in customer service department and 81 employees working as supervisors, showed
that teams that work from a highly collectivistic cultures tend to place much value towards
peer support, work-place harmony, and interpersonal relationships. This explains that need
for supervisors to create an interpersonal nature of OCBI behaviours when they want to
shape good citizenship behaviours. On the one hand, analysis findings reveal that when
people work together as a team, OCBI becomes important in contributing towards
performance ratings. However, an engagement in OCBO failed to show any contribution to
improvement in performance ratings. According to Alai, et al is that OCBO does not support
group norms.
While on the other hand, the study findings real that OCBO is likely to enhance
performance when teams work through individualistic culture. For instance, members from
individualistic cultures when they come together to form individualistic teams, they tend to
place more emphasis on how OCBO supports the role of a personal achievement,
uniqueness, and independence. Hence, OCBO show stronger association with job
performance ratings among employees that work through their individualistic teams.
Article 3
The third article by Kalinoski, et al. (2013) uses a theory and advance research on
three components- training, attitude, and diversity in order to examine the likely differential
effect towards effective, cognitive, and skill-based results. The study used meta-analytical
approach to understand the effects of differential diversity and training towards skills,
cognitive and effective outcomes. Kalinoski, et al. (2013) hypothesized that diversity training
creates greater opportunity for social interaction and hence, affective-based performance.
Secondly, they argue that diversity training creates motivation among people to strengthen
their personal differences and work as a team to achieve organizational objectives. The

Article Analysis 7
finding from content analysis shows that across all types of outcomes, diversity training had
smaller impact. However it had greater impact towards cognitive and skill based outcome
when related to affective-based outcomes. While on the other hand, moderators helped
enhance the effect of diversity training on affective outcome. Therefore, the study
concluded that managers in organisations could use diversity training when they want to
achieve higher affective-based outcomes. Any such training programs must ensure they
include diversity training.
Analysis of Articles
Diversity at the Workplace
The analysis from the three journal articles present common points of understanding
concerning diversity at the workplace. For example, article 1 and 2 agrees that diversity
among employees helps in enhancing performance through decision making, creativity,
information sharing, and motivation. However, the two articles seem to differ on the basis
of the nature of teams and characteristics of tasks. On the one hand the case of the first
article, Guillaume, et al. (2017) argues that team type and industry can only have an
effective when tasks relate to knowledge and innovation. While on the other hand, the
second article by Lai, et al (2013) maintain that teams whose individuals come from
collectivism cultures, enhance performance rating by creating interpersonal relationships,
peer support, and workplace harmony. While teams that come from individualistic cultures
only emphasizes OCBO because of the need to achieve uniqueness, independence, and
personal achievement. According to Guillaume, et al. (2017), diversity at the work place only
works to strengthen the bias that could arise because of failure to share information,
achieve social-integration, and well-being.
Diversity Training Programmes
Even though the third article by Kalinoski, et al. (2013) does not focus on ole of
diversity at the work place, they maintain that human resource managers should
incorporate diversity training programs in the normal practises. It is through doing this that
will help teams achieve affective, cognitive, as well as skill-based positive results. The first
article also supports these findings and explains that diversity training for teams can build

Article Analysis 8
on the principle of CEM when they want to achieve positive performance. Most importantly,
HR practises helps create relational coordination capabilities to promote social integration
and well-being among employees. It is apparent that the results from the three articles
matter in such a way that they could be applied by human resource managers in their real
work settings.
Recommendations
Diversity Training Programmes
This paper recommends that managers and organizations include diversity trainings
in their training and development programmes. Most importantly, the training must be
geared at achieving social categorization and information-processing. In terms of social
categorization, failure to include diversity training could cause disruption in formation of
sub-groups such as out-group and in-group. While on the other hand, failure to consider
information-processing in training could make teams fail to benefit from expertise and
knowledge. Consequently, teams might end up forming intergroup biases. When
implemented by human resources managers, they can shape attitudes among employees
towards their co-workers who come from different cultural backgrounds.
Formation of diversified teams
The second recommendation focuses on the need for human resource managers to
form diversified teams. Just as explained by Lai, et al. (2013), the nature of teams plays a
critical role in determining performance ratings and OCBI. In specific, managers need to help
form teams with employees from collectivist cultures and individualistic cultures to
eliminate cases of intergroup bias and enhance demographically diverse work teams.
Consequently, such a team can utilize innovation and information sharing to achieve higher
performance.
Conclusion
The analyses of the three articles provide an insight concerning the role of diversity
and diversity training initiatives. Most importantly, the three articles achieves a common
understanding concerning factors that moderates workplace diversity, how a company

Article Analysis 9
could go ahead to utilize differences among employees, and cultural perspectives. I agree
that that all the findings matter and those they could be applied in real work settings. Areas
of application should include incorporating diversity training plans and ensuring that human
resource managers determine the nature of teams to avoid cases of intergroup bias as well
as homogenous team cultures.
References
Guillaume, Y., Dawson, J., & Otaye-Ebede, L. (2017) Harnessing demographic differences in
organizations: What moderates the effects of workplace diversity? Journal of Organizational
Behavior, 38(2), 276-303
Kalinoski, Z. T., Steele-Johnson, D., Peyton, E. J., Leas, K. A., Steinke, J., & Bowling, N. A.
(2013). A meta-analytic evaluation of diversity training outcomes. Journal of Organizational
Behavior, 34(8), 1076-1104.
Lai, M., Y., Lam, W., & Lam, S.K. (2013). Organizational citizenship behavior in work groups:
A team cultural perspective. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 34(2), 1039-1056