The order of authorship bears no relation to the authors' relative contribution to the ideas in this paper; they produced the ideas in full collaboration. This research was funded by grants from the Ford Foundation and the Harvard Business School Division of Research. We are grateful to our colleagues in the FSC Research Group-Elaine Backman, Herminia Ibarra, Maureen Scully, and Kathleen Valley-for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We also thank Pamela Ellis, Russell Peace, Dalia Radley-Kingsley, and Rose Miller for their assistance with data collection. Finally, we thank Linda Johanson, Rod Kramer, Joe Porac, and the anonymous ASQ reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.This paper develops theory about the conditions under which cultural diversity enhances or detracts from work group functioning. From qualitative research in three culturally diverse organizations, we identified three different perspectives on workforce diversity: the integration-andlearning perspective, the access-and-legitimacy perspective, and the discrimination-and-fairness perspective. The perspective on diversity a work group held influenced how people expressed and managed tensions related to diversity, whether those who had been traditionally underrepresented in the organization felt respected and valued by their colleagues, and how people interpreted the meaning of their racial identity at work. These, in turn, had implications for how well the work group and its members functioned. All three perspectives on diversity had been successful in motivating managers to diversify their staffs, but only the integration-and-learning perspective provided the rationale and guidance needed to achieve sustained benefits from diversity. By identifying the conditions that intervene between the demographic composition of a work group and its functioning, our research helps to explain mixed results on the relationship between cultural diversity and work group outcomes.0 American management literature, both popular (e.g., Thomas, 1991;Morrison, 1992) and scholarly (e.g., Jackson et al., 1992; Cox, 1993), is rife with advice that managers should increase workforce diversity to enhance work group effectiveness. Empirical research on whether and how diversity is actually related to work group functioning is limited, however, and the evidence is mixed, depending in part on what kinds of differences constitute the "diversity" in question (see Milliken and Martins, 1996; Pelled, 1996, for reviews). Researchers have examined the impact of diversity in identity group memberships, such as race and sex (e.g., Cox, 1993; Jackson and Ruderman, 1995); organizational group memberships, such as hierarchical position or organizational function (e.g., Bantel and Jackson, 1989; Ancona and Caldwell, 1992); and individual characteristics, such as idiosyncratic attitudes, values, and preferences (e.g., Hoffman, 1959; Meglino, Ravlin, and Adkins, 1989; Bochner and Hesketh, 1994). Although certain types of diversity appear to be beneficial, studies...
