Maximizing workforce diversity in project teams: a network flow approach

Abstract

Several social, economic and political factors have contributed to the increasing diversity of today's workforce. In addition, in an era when organizations are continuously redesigning their work and restructuring their operations to achieve their goals with fewer resources, performing work in teams has become commonplace. These trends have increased the need for managing diverse work teams effectively. There are several existing models in the management science literature that help managers to assign employees to work groups in order to maximize the groups' diversity and hence, facilitate their effectiveness. This paper introduces a new model that recasts the problem of managing diversity in a different way: it is assumed that the population comes partitioned into `families' with a high degree of intra-familial similarity and inter-familial dissimilarity. The objective of the assignment then is to disperse these family members as evenly into the workgroups as possible. A little known network flow problem, known as the dining problem, is used to develop an efficient algorithm to produce solutions to this new model. This is followed by a report on an experimental application of the developed model to assign Master of Business Administration students in a business school to different projects in a course. As a part of this empirical report, an attractive feature of this model is also demonstrated; namely, how to conduct sensitivity analysis to determine the optimal levels of diversity in the presence of resource constraints. Finally, the paper concludes by discussing limitations of this new model and how they may be addressed in future research on this topic. Keywords: Decision making; Personnel/human resources; Manpower planning; Set partitioning; Optimization; Dining problem Article: 1. Introduction Among the many environmental trends affecting organizations in the 1990s is the rapidly changing composition of the workforce, a phenomenon known as workforce diversity. The word `diversity' refers to differences in a range of human qualities among individuals [17]. The traditional view of an organization characterized by workforce diversity is one in which there are increasing numbers of nondominant or minority social groups based on gender, race, ethnicity or nationality, resulting in heterogeneity in socio-cultural perspectives, world views, life styles, language and behavior [17]. However, recent approaches have also attempted to extend the concept of diversity to include other factors besides race, gender and ethnicity. As Thomas, Jr. argues in [25], employees differ on a variety of other dimensions such as age, functional and

Género y nueva economía: ¿se romperá el techo de cristal?

“…Género, raza o nacionalidad han sido consideradas como principales fuentes de diversidad aunque pueden existir otros factores que aporten distintos grados de diversidad, como la edad, la educación, la antigüedad en la empresa, estilos de vida, etc. (Bhadury et al, 2000).…”

Workforce planning incorporating skills: State of the art

“…The experience can for example depend on the assignments of tasks to workers. Huang et al [76] and Bhadury et al [23] propose a model in which workers have user-definable skills that can change through training. The model, however, lacks the implementation of the consequences of a change in skill level because of the training.…”

“…When the skill class is undefined, such as in [15,49,55,66,76], the skill determinants are also undefined in the respective paper. However, in several cases, only the skill class is defined while the skill determinants are to be defined by the user [12,19,20,23,24,28,34,71,74,79,80,83,84,96,98,100,114].…”

“…Bhadury et al [23]) model the synergetic effect of pooling differently skilled persons in a team. While Bhadury et al [23] do incorporate the synergetic effect, they are only concerned with maximizing the diversification in a team and fail to include some skill consequences like task restrictions or performance consequences (see Table 4). Table 4 presents the different consequences of skills.…”

Theoretical Perspectives to Diversity in Management Research

“…Thus, customer satisfaction has been examined as an important component for obtaining a higher market share. Therefore, some studies (Bhadury et al, 2000;Cox, 1991;Cox and Blake, 1991) specifically focus on creating a relationship between customer satisfaction and market share by employing a diverse workforce. Table 1.…”