Workforce Diversity, Temporal
Dimensions and Team Performance
by Beena S. Saji
The Author
The author works as a faculty member of the International Business Department,
Skyline College, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. The author’s area of specialisation
is organisational behaviour. The specific area of interest is time management,
creativity and social responsibility in organisations. Currently, the author is focus
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ing on an exploratory study on emotional labour among teaching professionals. Dr
Saji has a masters and Ph.D in Psychology and an MBA with HRM specialisation.
Introduction
Organisations today exist in environments steeped in speed. The speed of product
development, response to customers, and problem solving all can have dramatic
effects on both organisation and team performance levels. Many key functions in
flattened organisational hierarchies exist in teams of individuals, and team mem-
bers, particularly those dispersed geographically, must seamlessly co-ordinate
their activities over time in order to deliver their work when it is needed. How-
ever, the perception and importance of what “on time” means and how to achieve
such delivery may differ dramatically among team members. Perhaps earlier in
the development of theories about team dynamics under time pressure, when the
flow of information did not demand near-instantaneous response times from or
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ganisations, the examination of how different perceptions of deadlines influenced
on-time team performance might have seemed superfluous. Today, when entire
multimillion dollar organisations can be founded, survive, and die in a matter of
months this examination seems quite necessary. According to Bill Gates of Micro
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soft, business should be at the speed of thought. The speed with which your ideas
turn into product is very crucial for every business.
Work force diversity and teamwork are important to the progress of any
global organisation in recent years. Interesting and informative researches in the
area of team and teamwork are a part of journals and magazines related to man
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agement. Management theorists have moved from using the term, ‘work groups’
to ‘teams’ and they are of the opinion that teams yield better performance than a
work group (Katzenbach and Smith, 1991). According to them, work groups inter
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act primarily to share information and to make decisions to help each team mem
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ber perform within his area of responsibility. Teams out-perform individuals
where the tasks being done require multiple skills, judgement and experience.
40 Cross Cultural Management