ABSTRACT
INCREASED cultural and ethnic diversity in the workplace is altering the composition and environment of organizations in the United States and around the world. If current trends continue, the majority of the net new entrants into organizations in the U.S. by the year 2020 will be of Latin, Asian, or African decent (listed in descending order; Judy & D’Amico, 1997). These demographic changes have led organizational scholars to focus upon the effects of cultural diversity on workgroup behavior. Cultural diversity “means the representation, in one social system, of people with distinctly different group affiliations of cultural significance” (Cox, 1994, p. 6). National culture, ethnicity, language, gender, job position, age, or disability can index cultural diversity. For the purposes of the current review, cultural diversity is limited to considerations of national or ethnic culture in work groups. The rationale for this decision is threefold. First, other researchers have investigated and reviewed factors such as functional, gender,
age, or tenure diversity (e.g., Cox & Finley, 1995; Milliken & Martins, 1996; Williams & O’Reilly, 1998). Second, there is a great deal of research examining national and ethnic diversity and a thorough review of other types of diversity is beyond the scope of a single essay. Third, the focus on work groups, groups that perform primarily problem-solving and decision-making tasks, is due to the fact that the majority of research in this line investigates work groups, as opposed to social groups.
