Team Diversity in Chinese Organizations: A Review and a Qualitative Study

Although team diversity is a focal research topic in mainstream organizational behavior research (Harrison & Klein, 2007; Williams & O’Reilly, 1998), only a limited number of team diversity studies from non-North American or European communities have been published in English-language journals. Through a review in Study 1, we noticed this puzzling lack of research on team diversity in China (see the statistics in Table 1), and we wonder whether team diversity is a salient and meaningful topic in Chinese organizations, and if it is, what diversity attributes are important for Chinese employees. In Study 2, we interviewed 92 employees working in 38 teams from nine companies in China and found that many employees experienced diversity (72.13%) in working groups, and considered diversity to be important and desirable (45.9%). The list of salient diversity attributes shared by Chinese employees often overlap with attributes studied in the extant literature, yet Chinese employees also articulated attributes that were rarely examined by researchers. In addition, we discovered how Chinese employees sometimes associate conflicts, one of the major working mechanisms of team diversity, with team dysfunctions and leadership incompetence, which makes team diversity a taboo topic in the workplace. We discussed the theoretical implications of our findings to team diversity research in Asia and practical implications for team diversity management in Chinese organizations.