Suchergebnisse

This paper explores the relationship among three social dilemmas faced by organizations wishing to attain and maintain workforce diversity: the dilemmas of organizational participation, managerial participation, and individual participation. Functional and social category diversity offer benefits for organizations (creativity, adaptation and innovation, and access to external networks), but there are costs which deter organizations from pursuing these benefits. The costs associated with organizational participation in diversity initiatives arise because managers and their employees perceive organizational conflicts and organize their interactions along social identity lines, so that temporal traps and collective fences surround diversity. Resolving the subordinate dilemmas of managerial and individual participation provides the key to resolving the dilemma of organizational participation. Social identity theory is used to understand the dilemmas and to develop possible resolutions, which should make the benefits of diversity more immediately accessible to organizations and society.

This book presents an accessible and state-of-the-art survey of current research on social dilemmas. A social dilemma arises when actions that are justifiable in terms of individual rationality (e.g. over-harvesting resources, or using private instead of public transportation) threaten the common good and in the long run the individual's own self-interest as well. The study of social dilemmas has important links with many areas in psychology, as well as with cognate disciplines such as risk analysis, environmental science, political science, and economics. Accordingly, the book should appea

Recent studies suggest that group brainstorming, in its electronic form, can be an effective method of generating ideas, if the group is sufficiently large. We report here an experiment probing the mechanism underlying this good performance. Because larger groups are more likely than small ones to generate rare ideas, we hypothesized that rare ideas might be especially stimulating to further idea generation, and thus boost the performance of large, interacting groups. Experimental subjects working alone generated ideas while exposed to streams of either rare, common, or no stimulus ideas. No support for the hypothesized stimulating effect of rare ideas was found. We suggest several alternative mechanisms worth exploring.