Imagine being the only marketer in a room full of engineers or the only Czech in a team of Russians. In order to know how to function effectively in culturally diverse groups of people, you first need to understand who the under-represented ones are. According to the management-issues.com website, we implicitly favour people who are somehow similar to ourselves; we also show much greater sympathy and trust towards them.
Who is different?
Disproportionate representation skews the ways people in a minority are perceived. If a minority forms less than 15% of the group as a whole, it is perceived as being quite different. Yet if there were just a few more of them, their cultural differences would simply be overlooked. This is why the majority, the dominant subgroup, will tend to assume any unusual behaviours are of a cultural nature, although in fact that might not be true.
If you are visibly different, then you can sense the extra pressure: you are being evaluated and thus feel a need to behave better. What constitutes appropriate behaviour would be different if there were more people around like yourself. Nor does the difference always have to be obvious: your sexual orientation, ideology, socioeconomic status or tenure may deviate from what is the norm for the rest of your group.
Under-representation is context-specific: it depends on which group is being talked about. There are still relatively few men in the HR profession and relatively few women among engineers. This is something you always need to think about if you want to find out who the members of the under-represented subgroup are in your team, department or organisation.
What really matters
What is really important are the various values and perspectives that stem from diversity. Different approaches for communicating, planning and executing tasks form the core of what is so positive about diversity. When ideas on how things should be done clash, innovation is more likely to appear – providing you manage to keep all conflicts positive.
-jk-