Diversity in Distributed Decision Making: An Exploratory Study

Diversity is defined as the differences among factors like ethnicity, gender, culture, sexuality and anything that makes two entities different from each other. Diversity creates a heterogeneous environment and is becoming an inherent part of all groups, especially virtual groups that consist of geographically distributed members. This paper studies diversity in the context of virtual groups that work together in an online environment and its effect on group performance. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, we can learn from groups used in on-line courses and extend those experiences to geographically distributed groups. The members of a typical e-learning group are different in race, gender, countries and backgrounds mimicking diversity that is often related to geographically distributed teams. A longitudinal experiment involving online classes was conducted and the results are reported. Our research revealed that diverse groups are not good for ad-hoc tasks but maybe good for on-going tasks. Future research areas are also discussed.