Diversity is an increasingly important factor in organizational life as organizations worldwide become more diverse in terms of the gender, race, ethnicity, age, national origin, and other personal characteristics of their members. The exact impact of within-group diversity on small group processes and performance is unclear. Sometimes the effect of diversity seems positive, at other times negative, and in other situations, there seems to be no effect at all. In this article, we suggest that these types of findings might be explained by using a "group-development" model to examine the impact of diversity on group processes and performance. Our model uses concepts from Jackson et al.'s (1995), Milliken and Martins' (1996), and other models, as well as our own concepts, to show how diversity affects group development and performance. Among the concepts included in the model are readily detectable personal attributes, underlying personal attributes, cognitive paradigm dissimilarity, cognitive costs and rewards, diversity management skills, group behavioral integration, and cognitive performance resources. In the pages that follow, we will explain each of the components of the model and suggest specific hypotheses generated from the model.

The need for a unified, cross-level (organization, work group, individual employee) model of organizational downsizing has been suggested by several authors (e.g., Kozlowski et al., 1993). The definition of downsizing, in terms applicable only at the organization level, prevents researchers from developing a more cohesive view of the interactive impact of downsizing for the organization, work groups, and individuals. In this paper, we define downsizing more broadly as a constellation of stressor events centering around pressures toward work force reductions which place demands upon the organization, work groups, and individual employees, and require a process of coping and adaptation. This stress-based view of downsizing allows researchers to develop concepts to guide research on downsizing that are more broadly applicable across levels of analysis. To show the advantages of this stress-based view of downsizing, this paper uses concepts from the stress coping literature to identify a set of critical dependent variables that should be studied in downsizing research. We argue that these variables are applicable for organization, group, and individual employee-level research.

This paper presents a crisis decision‐making model for understanding the decision processes and actions of organizations in labour oversupply situations. A number of macro‐organizational and environmental variables, intra‐organizational process variables, and managerial experience with oversupply situations are predicted to affect whether organizations perceived a labour oversupply as a ‘crisis’. Crisis level was predicted to affect decision‐making and actions taken to deal with the oversupply. An initial test of the model was made using data collected from 82 Australian organizations. Although some aspects of the model operated as predicted, critical relationships between crisis variables and decision‐making processes were opposite to prediction. These contradictory findings are explained using a stress response‐based model. While alterations in the crisis model are needed, canonical correlation analyses indicated that the variables measured did relate to how organizations reacted to labour oversupply.

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