Decision Making in Diverse Swift Teams: An Exploratory Study

In the digital age swift teams are becoming the new norm. These work groups are ad-hoc and have very little knowledge or previous interaction with other group members. Dynamics of these groups are complicated because of the group member's diversity and short duration of the projects. Diversity studies have focused on categorization such as ethnicity, gender, culture, sexuality differences on one hand and functional diversity which relates to task-related knowledge, skills, opinions and perspective on the other hand. This paper goes a step further and studies group productivity in term of social diversity of group members in the context of face-to-face groups. The members of a typical swift group are different in race, gender, nationality and backgrounds; different in relation to task-related expertise and initial familiarity with each other. Groups in face-to-face classes mimic diversity that is often related to real life swift teams. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, we can learn from groups used in face-to-face courses and extend those experiences to swift groups. Our research revealed that diversity is associated with decision making in swift groups. We also found evidence that social diversity creates sub-groups which is associated with group decision making. Future research areas are also discussed.